Abstract. The aim of this paper is to establish a higher integrability result for very weak solutions of certain parabolic systems whose model is the parabolic p(x, t)-Laplacian system. Under assumptions on the exponent function p :n+2 , 2 , it is shown that any very weak solution u :, provided ε > 0 is small enough. This extends the main result of [V. Bögelein and Q. Li, Nonlinear Anal., 98 (2014), pp. 190-225] to the subquadratic case.