This paper considers applying bit loading to multicarrier non-othogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. The objective is to maximize the system total throughput while satisfying the users’ individual quality of service (QoS) constraints. Although bit loading is generally an NP-hard problem, even for orthogonal multiple access (OMA), the mutual interference between the users and the dependence of power coefficients and modulation orders are additional challenges that add substantial complexity to the optimization problem. Therefore, we propose in this paper an efficient bit loading algorithm for multicarrier NOMA systems and compares the complexity and throughput with OMA. The obtained results show that NOMA has virtual cognition and hybrid modes of operation, NOMA/OMA, that enables NOMA to outperform OMA by 100% for the two-user scenario. The complexity of the loading process for NOMA is noticeably higher than OMA, which is due to the high computational complexity of bit error rate (BER) computation for NOMA. The obtained results show that the NOMA throughput depends on which user is loaded first, and on the initially loaded bits.