Very fast image and video codecs are a pursued goal both in the academia and the industry. This paper presents a complexity scalable and parallel bitplane coding engine for wavelet-based image codecs. The proposed method processes the coefficients in parallel, suiting hardware architectures based on vector instructions. Our previous work is extended with a mechanism that provides complexity scalability to the system. Such a feature allows the coder to regulate the throughput achieved at the expense of slightly penalizing compression effi- ciency. Experimental results suggests that, when using the fastest speed, the method almost doubles the throughput of our previous engine while penalizing compression efficiency by about 10%