A system, a method and an apparatus are disclosed herein for receiver terminal driven joint encoder and decoder mode adaptation for SU-MIMO transmission. In one embodiment, the system comprises a transmitter that is able to be directed to transmit wireless signals over a multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) system using any of a plurality of encoding modes; and a user terminal having a receiver comprising a decoding module which has a plurality of decoding modes, each of which can be used to decode communications from the transmitter received over a multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) channel, wherein at least one encoding mode is operable with multiple of the decoding modes. The system also comprises a joint selection module that is operable to select for the MIMO transmission the decoding mode from the plurality of decoding modes and an encoding mode from the plurality of encoding modes to be used by the transmitter on the channel, the selection being based on receiver-dependent criteria corresponding to the decoding mode associated with the encoding mode and channel information, receiver hardware and state, and application-specific constraints. The joint selection module is operable to send information to identify the encoding mode to the transmitter using a feedback channel.