It is well known that the performance of turbo codes can be improved by optimizing the energy allocation on coded symbols. Based on this fact, we propose an optimized 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation for binary turbo codes. In the proposed scheme, the energy allocated on turbo coded symbols is optimized by modifying the constellation of QAM. The proposed 16-QAM constellation combined with a binary turbo code offers better coding gain compared to the conventional combination of binary turbo code and QAM.