Methods, systems, and devices for soft hybrid automatic repeat request operation in wireless communication are described. A user equipment (UE) may fail to decode a received signal, for example. The UE may store a portion of the signal in a buffer if the signal size is greater than the buffer size; otherwise, the UE may store the entire signal in the buffer. The UE may then receive a second signal and combine the second signal with the stored portion of the first signal; the combined signal may be larger than the buffer size. This combined signal may, for example, have a code rate less than the first signal. The UE may perform a second decoding attempt on the combined signal. The UE may determine that the second decoding attempt failed and may store a portion of the combined signal in the buffer.