A method of concatenation for LDPC encoding in an OFDM wireless system selects codewords based on the data packet payload size, wherein the payload size is the number of transmitted information bits in octets. For low transmission rates, shortening and puncturing across all codewords within the packet is applied to minimize OFDM symbol padding. For high transmission rates, only shortening across all codewords within the packet is applied to minimize OFDM symbol padding.