Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described that support channel selection for parity bits in polar coding techniques. In some cases, an encoder or decoder of a wireless device may assign information bits, frozen bits, and parity check bits to polar channels of an encoder or decoder based on reliability metrics. The information bits may initially be assigned and based on a channel index of the first information bit, the parity check bits may be assigned to channels having higher channel indices than the first information bit. After assignment, the bits may be encoded or decoded.