According to some embodiments of the disclosed method and apparatus, systems and methods are provided that utilize extra payload capacity present in a symbol pad of a PHY payload to decrease the coding rate of an FEC coding scheme without increasing the symbol rate or decreasing the PHY rate of a corresponding data transmission. If a symbol pad length that would result from encoding a MAC frame using a default coding scheme would be at least as great as a parity length of the default coding scheme, and a new coding scheme maintaining the same parity length but having a reduced information bit length may be determined and used to encode the MAC frame. Owing the reduced information bit length, the new coding scheme has a reduced coding rate, but maintains the same number of OFDM symbols as the default coding scheme.