SummarySingle carrier‐frequency division multiple access (SC‐FDMA) has been adopted as the uplink transmission standard in fourth generation cellular network to enable the power efficiency transmission in mobile station. Because multiuser MIMO (MU‐MIMO) is a promising technology to fully exploit the channel capacity in mobile radio network, this paper investigates the uplink transmission of SC‐FDMA systems with orthogonal space frequency block codes (SFBC). Two linear MU‐MIMO receivers, orthogonal SFBC (OSFBC) and minimum mean square error (MMSE), are derived for the scenarios with limited number of users or adequate receive antennas at base station. In order to effectively eliminate the multiple access interference (MAI) and fully exploit the capacity of MU‐MIMO channel, we propose a turbo MU‐MIMO receiver, which iteratively utilizes the soft information from maximum a posteriori decoder to cancel the MAI. By the simulation results in several typical MIMO channels, we find that the proposed MMSE MU‐MIMO receiver outperforms the OSFBC receiver over 1 dB at the cost of higher complexity. However, the proposed turbo MU‐MIMO receivers can effectively cancel the MAI under overloaded channel conditions and really achieve the capacity of MU‐MIMO channel. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.