diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.1.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.1.rst
index 565b4a014bd0c..4b25b1c1bf51a 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.1.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.1.1.rst
@@ -27,6 +27,7 @@ Fixed regressions
 - Fixed regression where :meth:`DataFrame.merge_asof` would raise a ``UnboundLocalError`` when ``left_index`` , ``right_index`` and ``tolerance`` were set (:issue:`35558`)
 - Fixed regression in ``.groupby(..).rolling(..)`` where a custom ``BaseIndexer`` would be ignored (:issue:`35557`)
 - Fixed regression in :meth:`~pandas.core.groupby.DataFrameGroupBy.agg` where a list of functions would produce the wrong results if at least one of the functions did not aggregate. (:issue:`35490`)
+- Fixed regression in :func:`pandas.read_excel` where ``encoding`` was removed but is necessary for some files (:issue:`35753`)
 
 .. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
diff --git a/pandas/io/excel/_base.py b/pandas/io/excel/_base.py
index b1bbda4a4b7e0..aee705976f3d1 100644
--- a/pandas/io/excel/_base.py
+++ b/pandas/io/excel/_base.py
@@ -199,6 +199,8 @@
     Duplicate columns will be specified as 'X', 'X.1', ...'X.N', rather than
     'X'...'X'. Passing in False will cause data to be overwritten if there
     are duplicate names in the columns.
+encoding : str, default "utf-8"
+    The encoding to use to decode bytes.
 
 Returns
 -------
@@ -298,6 +300,7 @@ def read_excel(
     skipfooter=0,
     convert_float=True,
     mangle_dupe_cols=True,
+    encoding: str = "utf-8",
 ):
 
     if not isinstance(io, ExcelFile):
@@ -332,6 +335,7 @@ def read_excel(
         skipfooter=skipfooter,
         convert_float=convert_float,
         mangle_dupe_cols=mangle_dupe_cols,
+        encoding=encoding,
     )