Higher-order modulation is promising technique of 5th-generation mobile systems to increase data rate within a limited bandwidth. This paper presents the transmission performance of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based 1024-QAM in multipath fading propagation conditions by link-level simulation, as well as under static propagation condition. The BER performance is investigated for two types of propagation models, i.e., "extended pedestrian A" and "extended vehicular A" models, specified by 3GPP as parameters of the coding rates. The SNR penalties are also described with respect to the case of AWGN with phase error to meet a BER of 10 −2 for OFDM-based 1024-QAM. Using these results, we validate the application of OFDM-based 1024-QAM to mobile communication systems.