This article investigates two fairness criteria with regard to adaptive resource allocation for uplink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Nash bargaining solution (NBS) fairness and proportional fairness (PF) are two suitable candidates for fairness consideration, and both can provide attractive trade-offs between total throughput and each user’s capacity. Utilizing Karush-Kuhn- Tucker (KKT) condition and iterative method, two effective algorithms are designed, to achieve NBS fairness and proportional fairness, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed resource allocation algorithms achieve good tradeoff between the overall rate and fairness, with little performance loss from the total capacity. This article investigates two fairness criteria with regard to adaptive resource allocation for uplink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Nash bargaining solution (NBS) fairness and proportional fairness (PF) are two suitable candidates for fairness consideration, and both can provide attractive trade-offs between total throughput and each user’s capacity. Utilizing Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition and iterative method, two effective algorithms are designed, to achieve NBS fairness and proportional fairness, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed resource allocation algorithms achieve good tradeoff between the overall rate and fairness, with little performance loss from the total capacity.