A method and apparatus for retransmission processing in a communication receiver includes improving the performance of Incremental Redundancy (IR) combining and retransmission processing at minimal increased complexity. One aspect of these improvements involves the use of prior decoding results, if the decoding block quality is above a threshold value, rather than or in addition to prior demodulation results, in retransmission processing. That is, the teachings herein propose selectively using the hard bit decisions obtained from decoding previously transmitted data blocks, to improve the decoding of retransmitted data blocks.