Pilot data aided feed forward (PAFF) carrier recovery is essential for phase noise tracking in coherent optical receivers. This paper describes a new PAFF system based on new pilot arrangement and maximum likelihood (ML) to estimate the phase jitter in coherent receiverinduced by local oscillator’s lasers and sampling clock errors. Square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) (4, 16, 64, and 256) schemes were used. A detailed mathematical description of the method was presented. The system performance was evaluated through numerical simulations and compared to those with noisefree receiver (ideal receiver) and feed forward without ML. The simulation results show that PAFF performs near the expected ideal phase recovery. Results clearly suggest that ML significantly improves the tolerance of phase error variance. From bit error rate (BER) sensibility evaluation, it was clearly observed that the new estimation method performs better with a 4-QAM (or quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)) format compared to three others square QAM schemes. Analog to digital converter (ADC) resolution effect on the system performance was analyzed in terms of Q-factor. Finite resolution effect on 4-QAM is negligible while it negatively affects the system performance when M increases.