In this paper, a novel signal-to-clip-ping noise ratio and least squares approxima-tion tone reservation scheme (SCR-LSA TR) is proposed to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. During the SCR pro-cedure, only the element with the maximal amplitude is picked for processing, which not only decreases the algorithm complexity, but also helps to overcome the BER deterioration. With the LSA method, the amplitude of the peak-cancelling signals can approximate to that of the original clipping noise as much as possible. Through the combination of the optimization factor in the LSA method, the classic SCR method can achieve better PAPR reduction with faster convergence. Simulation results show that the proposed SCR-LSA TR scheme has less in-band distortion and smaller out-of-band spectral radiation. The BER of the proposed scheme shows a better performance especially under the 16-QAM over the addi-tive white Gaussian noise channel.