Aspects relate to techniques for MCS selection of a packet to be network coded for sidelink communication. A transmitting UE may encode a packet using an MCS that is greater than a normal MCS that may be used for encoding the packet without network coding. The transmitting UE may then transmit the encoded packet to one or more receiving UEs and a network coding device over a sidelink data channel. The transmitting UE may further transmit a network coding request flag associated with the packet to initiate one or more retransmissions of the packet by the network coding device.