By using the cyclostationarity property of communication signals, a higher-order cyclic cumulants based carrier phase estimation algorithm for QAM signals is proposed. Normalized higher-order cyclic cumulants were utilized for the estimation, and the effect of the signal energy, time delay and pulse function with different roll-off parameters on the estimator was eliminated by the normalization. The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed estimation algorithm were verified via theoretical analysis and simulations.