An adaptive partial transmit sequence (PTS) technique is presented for the reduction of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAP) of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal. The main problem for PTS is how to minimise thr number of iterations necessary for locating the optimal weighting factors (which increases exponentially with the number of sub-blocks). In the proposed adaptive PTS approach, the iterations are stopped oner the PAP drops below a preset threshold. For an OFDM system with 256 subcarriers and QPSK data symbols, adaptive PTS reduces the 0.1% PAP by 4dB, while PTS (non-adaptive) reduces it by 4.1dB. The complexity of adaptive PTS is just 2% of that of PTS.