Abstract Nonuniformly spaced 16QAM(Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and 64QAM schemes with unequal error protection(UEP) that are designed using Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) are proposed in this paper. Compared with conventional uniformly spaced MQAM, both the important data and the less important data of UEP MQAM can obtain several decibels of coding gain.