An apparatus and method for transmitting and receiving data, wherein retransmissions of information can be a different size from the initial transmission. The invention utilizes a partial Chase encoder 306 to truncate or expand data depending on the availability of channel resources for retransmission. A partial Chase combiner 314 processes the received demodulated data based solely on the number of codes and modulation received (i.e., predetermined, with no additional signaling required). If the received retransmission is smaller than the first transmission, only a portion of the soft bits are combined. If the retransmission is larger than the first transmission, some values of the stored first transmission are combined with more than one received soft bit in the retransmission.