Efficient nonlinear companding transform (NCT) scheme for reducing peak-to-average power (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals is proposed. This scheme transforms the Gaussian-distributed signals into the specified statistics form defined as a piecewise function. By adjusting the transform parameters, it enables more design flexibility in companding form so that a favorable trade-off between PAPR and bit error rate (BER) can be offered. Compared to existing techniques, the scheme can achieve an effective reduction in PAPR as well as an improved BER performance simultaneously.