Abstract In this paper, candidate coding schemes are investigated for the new radio access technology (RAT) of the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication standard. Enhanced mobile broadband(eMBB) scenario of the 5G standard corresponding the activities in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) is considered. The coding schemes are evaluated in terms of block error rate (BLER), bit error rate (BER), computational complexity, and flexibility. These parameters comprise a suitable set to assess the performance of different services and applications. Turbo, low density parity check (LDPC), and polar codes are considered as the candidate schemes. These are investigated in terms of obtaining suitable rates, block lengths by proper design for a fair comparison. The simulations have been carried out in order to obtain BLER / BER performance for various code rates and block lengths, in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. It can be seen from the simulations that although polar codes perform well at short block lengths, LDPC has a relatively good performance at all the block lengths and code rates. In addition, complexity of the LDPC codes is relatively low.