Abstract: This paper focuses on construction of efficient rate-compatible irregular repeat accumulate (RC-IRA) codes over a wide rate range. Puncturing approach is the conventional approach. But the asymptotic performance shows that it only works well when the amount of puncturing is small. To extend the dynamic rate range, a special extending approach is proposed. Repeat-accumulate codes are used to produce padded parity bits. Combined the two approaches, RC-IRA codes are constructed. Simulation results show that the throughput of RC-IRA codes applied to ARQ system have performance close to that of turbo ARQ system, yet with lower decoding complexity.