Transmission power control is an important means to manage the radio resources in wireless communications. The performance, however, may be reduced due to time delays as in any controlled system. Most controllers to date are designed without considering time delays, which may result in oscillatory or unstable systems. To overcome these problems, time delay compensation (TDC) is introduced. The main idea is to adjust the measurements [e.g., signal-to-interference ratio (SIR)] to include the effects of issued but not yet applied power control commands. TDC thereby improves the stability and performance of an arbitrary power control algorithm. The benefits are illustrated by simulations using some popular power control algorithms.