A multi-carrier linear equalization receiver, e.g., a RAKE receiver or chip equalization receiver, is described herein. The multi-carrier receiver distributes processing delays among a plurality of received carriers based on a comparison between the signal-to-interference ratios (SIRs) determined for each carrier. The receiver initially allocates a minimum number of processing delays to each carrier. In one embodiment, any remaining additional processing delays are distributed evenly between the carriers when a comparison between the largest and smallest SIR is less than or equal to a threshold. In another embodiment, the remaining additional processing delays are distributed to favor the carrier(s) with the strongest SIR(s) when the comparison between the largest and smallest SIR exceeds the threshold. By distributing the additional processing delays to favor the carriers with the strongest SIRs, the embodiments of the present invention enable system designers to limit the total number of available processing delays without sacrificing performance.