Methods and apparatus for channel detection in an uplink shared control channel. In an exemplary embodiment, a method includes generating soft-combined bit streams for an acknowledgement (ACK) indicator, rank indicator (RI), and channel quality indicator (CQI) received in an uplink shared channel. The method also includes decoding the ACK, RI, and CQI soft-combined bit streams to generate Top-M decoded bit streams for each indicator, and generating Top-Q symbols for each indicator from the Top-M decoded bit streams for each indicator. The method also includes calculating metrics from the Top-Q symbols and uplink control information (UCI) symbols extracted from the uplink shared channel, combining the metrics to form a search space, and searching the search space to determine transmitted ACK, RI, and CQI bits.