Certain aspects of the present disclosure relate to methods and apparatus for pilot design for Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT). In certain aspects, the method generally includes determining at least one binary code sequence to use as a demodulation reference signal (DMRS) for a channel transmitted across one or more subframes using one or more tones within a resource block (RB) allocated to the UE for narrowband communication, and transmitting the channel including the DMRS using the one or more tones and the determined binary code sequence. In certain aspects, the binary code sequence may be determined based on a binary random sequence, such as pseudo noise (PN) or Gold sequence.