In this paper, an error recovery (ER) detection based on the lattice reduction (LR) algorithm with adaptive iteration is presented for uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to obtain an improved bit error rate (BER) performance, especially when the number of active users increases. In the proposed algorithm, as the result of LR preprocessing, a larger diagonally dominant index (DDI) is used to measure the diagonal dominance of gram matrix for the initialisation of the ER detection. In addition, the larger DDI could be further used to realise adaptive iteration, which helps to strike a trade-off between the BER performance and the computational complexity. Moreover, two properties of the DDI are derived, and the simulation results show that the larger DDI leads to better detection performance, and it could be widely applied to linear elimination and MIMO detection algorithms. How to cite this article: Wu W, Jiang X, Hou J Adaptive iterative error recovery detection algorithm for uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output systems IET Communications 2021; 1-9.