Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. A wireless system may support efficient techniques for adding license assisted access (LAA) secondary cells (SCells) to a secondary timing advance group (sTAG). For example, a base station may determine whether to add an LAA SCell to an sTAG based on whether the LAA SCell is a scheduling carrier for a user equipment (UE). That is, the base station may determine whether to add an LAA SCell to an sTAG based on whether a UE scheduled to communicate over the LAA SCell is self-scheduled over the LAA SCell or cross-carrier scheduled over another cell. As such, the wireless system may improve the likelihood that a UE may receive a downlink transmission over an LAA SCell in an sTAG that the UE may use to determine a downlink timing reference for an uplink transmission over the LAA SCell.