A method and apparatus for a non-linear adaptive scheme for transmit out of band emission cancellation is provided. Embodiments disclosed herein provide a method for removing unwanted transmitter emissions from a composite received signal. The method performs the steps of: extracting the I and Q samples from a modulator output; inputting the I and Q samples to a non-linear filter; applying weights to the non-linear filter outputs, combining the non-linear filter outputs to generate a broadband emission estimate; selecting a portion of a transmit emission in a desired portion of a receive band; subtracting an output of the non-linear filter from a composite signal; and feeding back a residual error to the non-linear filter; adapting the non-linear filter iteratively.