A method, an apparatus, a base station, and a user equipment (UE) for wireless communication are provided to reduce the retransmission latency for URLLC communications. Upon receiving a downlink data transmission, a UE waits until it completes decoding of the received downlink data transmission before it can send an ACK/NAK report on the decoded downlink data transmission. In case of a decoding failure, the base station cannot start retransmission until the UE finishes the decoding of the downlink data transmission and sends the ACK/NAK report and until the base station finishes decoding of an NAK in the ACK/NAK report. This considerable retransmission latency may not meet stringent latency requirements of some URLLC applications. A two-stage ACK/NAK reporting is disclosed to reduce the retransmission latency where the UE sends an early ACK/NAK report upon partially completing the decoding of the downlink data transmission.