The present application relates to devices and components including apparatus, systems, and methods to provide adaptive physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) monitoring. In particular, a unified signaling technique for adaptive PDCCH search space monitoring is descried. This signaling can indicate either one or a combination of the switching and skipping. In an example, the signaling includes multiple parts. In a first part, radio resource control (RRC) signaling is sent from the network to the device to configure the device for switching only, skipping only, or switching and skipping. In a second part, first DCI is sent from the network to the device to indicate the particular PDCCH monitoring configuration to use for the PDCCH search space monitoring. Thereafter, network sends second DCI in the relevant PDCCH search space, where this second DCI schedules traffic. The device performs blind decoding to determine the second DCI in order to exchange the traffic.