Purpose Filter design plays an essential role in most communication standards. The essential element of the software-defined radio is a channelizer that comprises several channel filters. Designing filters with lower complexity, minimized area and enhanced speed is a demanding task in currently prevailing communication standards. This study aims to propose an efficient reconfigurable residue number system (RNS)-based multiply-accumulate (MAC) channel filter for software radio receivers. Design/methodology/approach RNS-based pipelined MAC module for the realization of channel finite impulse response (FIR) filter architecture is considered in this work. Further, the use of a single adder and single multiplier for realizing the filter architecture regardless of the number of taps offers effective resource sharing. This design provides significant improvement in speed of operation as well as a reduction in area complexity. Findings In this paper, two major tasks have been considered: first, the RNS number conversion is performed in which the integer is converted into several residues. These residues are processed in parallel and are applied to the MAC-FIR filter architecture. Second, the MAC filter architecture involves pipelining, which enhances the speed of operation to a significant extent. Also, the time-sharing-based design incorporates a single partial product-based shift and add multiplier and single adder, which provide a low complex design. The results show that the proposed 16-tap RNS-based pipelined MAC sub-filter achieves significant improvement in speed as well as 89.87% area optimization when examined with the conventional RNS-based FIR filter structure. Originality/value The proposed MAC-FIR filter architecture provides good performance in terms of complexity and speed of operation because of the use of the RNS scheme with pipelining and partial product-based shift and adds multiplier and single adder when examining with the conventional designs. The reported architecture can be used in software radios.