A method of wireless communication by a user equipment (UE) includes receiving a number of uplink grants from a base station. The method further includes estimating a payload size for data to be transmitted from a UE buffer for a number of logical channels. The payload size corresponds to a sum of a number of data bytes to be transmitted and an amount of overhead bytes to be transmitted. The method still further includes determining a subset of the number of uplink grants to use for uplink transmission based on reducing a total padding size associated with transmitting the payload size, for each combination of the number of uplink grants. The method also includes transmitting the data from the UE buffer within a number of transport blocks, to the base station. The number of transport blocks corresponds to the subset of the number of uplink grants.