Recently, hierarchical modulation has been considered as a way to increase the payload data in terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) transmission systems. This paper proposes a robust symbol synchronization method for T- DMB receivers working in the hierarchical modulation mode. The proposed method employs a timing error detector (TED) which produces a timing phase error at OFDM symbol rate instead of the frame rate. This method thus results in the robust synchronization of symbol timing in the presence of a sampling frequency offset (SFO). Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional one especially at a large SFO .