A responding station (STA) for adaptive ranging may comprise a transceiver configured to receive, from an initiating STA, a signal comprising one or more of a frame or a data packet, and a processing device. The processing device may be configured to: identify, at the responding STA, one or more of the frame or the data packet; identify, at the responding STA, one or more physical layer measurements based on the one or more of the frame or the data packet; identify, at the responding STA, one or more application layer requests comprising a ranging accuracy level; and determine, at the responding STA, one or more ranging parameters for a ranging operation based on the one or more physical layer measurements and the ranging accuracy level.