A bound is given on the rate of channel polarization. As a corollary, an earlier bound on the probability of error for polar coding is improved. Specifically, it is shown that, for any binary-input discrete memoryless channel W with symmetric capacity I(W) and any rate R < I(W), the polar-coding blockerror probability under successive cancellation decoding satisfies Pe(N;R) ≥ 2-Nβ for any β > 1/2 when the block-length N is large enough. © 2009 IEEE.