Embodiments disclosed herein provide systems and methods for dynamically adjusting preambles for a random access channel. In a particular embodiment, a method provides, for a wireless access node having a random access channel, determining a demand for contention based preambles of the random access channel and a demand for contention free preambles of the random access channel. The method further provides determining a number of contention based preambles and a number of contention free preambles for the random access channel based on the demand for contention based preambles and the demand for contention free preambles. The method also provides allocating the number of contention based preambles and the number of contention free preambles to the random access channel.