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The key challenge in free space optical (FSO) communications is combating turbulence‐induced fading. As the channel fading in FSO is quasi‐static, the transmission parameters such as the code rates, transmit power and modulation schemes can be modified with respect to the channel state information transmitted via the feedback path. As a result, adaptive channel coding is considered as one of the practical approaches to improve the FSO link performance. In this study, the FSO system with polar codes is investigated and its performance is analysed by determining the optimum code‐rate required to achieve a bit error rate of 10−9 under weak turbulence. It is shown that, using Monte‐Carlo simulations for the scintillation indices of 0.12 and 0.2, the successive cancelation list (SCL) decoder offers coding gains of 2.5 and 0.3 dB, respectively, as compared with SC decoder, and for the scintillation index of 0.31, the SC decoder offers a coding gain of 2.5 dB compared to that of the SCL decoder for the code rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]