In palette-based coding, a video coder may form a so-called “palette” as a table of colors representing the video data of a given block. The video coder may code index values for one or more pixels values of a current block of video data, where the index values indicate entries in the palette that represent the pixel values of the current block. A method includes determining a palette for a block of video data, identifying escape pixel(s) not associated with any palette entries, identifying a single quantization parameter (QP) value for all escape pixels of the block for a given color channel using a QP value for non-palette based coding of transform coefficients, dequantizing each escape pixel using the identified QP value, and determining pixel values of the block using the dequantized escape pixels and index values for any pixel(s) associated with any palette entries.