We present two phase noise estimation algorithms for single-carrier burst communications. The first and second estimation techniques (denoted as PEA1 and PEA2 respectively) are based on a truncated discrete cosine transform (DCT) basis expansion of the phase noise and of the corresponding phasor, respectively and do not require any knowledge of the phase noise statistics. An initial pilot-based estimate is iteratively improved by means of the expectation-maximization algorithm, yielding a soft-decision-directed phase noise estimate. The performances of PEA1 and PEA2 are compared in terms of the mean-square phase error and bit-error rate. Numerical results show that PEA2 outperforms PEA1 for practical values of the signal-to-noise ratio.