In this paper, a reduced-complexity partial transmit sequences (PTS) scheme is proposed to resolve the intrinsic high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In the proposed PTS scheme, a cost function is generated by summing the power of the time-domain samples at time in each subblock. Only those samples with greater than or equal to a preset threshold are used for peak power calculation during the process of selecting a candidate signal with the lowest PAPR for transmission. As compared to the conventional PTS scheme, the proposed one achieves almost the same PAPR reduction performance with much lower computational complexity.