Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. A base station may determine to apply tone reservation to a downlink transmission from the base station to a user equipment (UE), and may select to rate match data of the downlink transmission around selected resource elements for the tone reservation instead of puncturing the data of the downlink transmission. The base station may transmit, to the UE, a message indicating that tone reservation is applied to the downlink transmission via rate matching, and transmit the downlink transmission including the data rate matched around the selected resource elements used for tone reservation. The UE may identify the selected resource elements used for tone reservation based on an estimation of a channel between the UE and the base station, and decode the data of the downlink transmission via rate matching around the selected resource elements used for tone reservation.