Embodiments include methods that may be performed by a processor of a mobile device and a processor of a base station for managing beam failure recovery (BFR). The processor of the mobile device may determine whether a beam failure of a communication link with a base station has occurred, determine whether contention free random access (CFRA) resources have been configured in response to determining that a beam failure has occurred, and initiate contention based random access (CBRA) in response to determining that CFRA resources have not been configured. The processor of the base station may receive from the mobile device a message initiating CBRA, determine whether a downlink beam or quasi-colocation (QCL) assumption a downlink resource of a physical random access channel (PRACH) is different from any active downlink beam or QCL assumption, and perform CBRA with the mobile device.