In the recent years there is a drastic improvement in the communication systems. The discovery of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing technique (OFDM) plays a major role in the high data rate communication system. However, the main drawback of OFDM systems is high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR). Many of the existing PAPR reduction methods have drawbacks such as high complexity, increased Bit Error Rate (BER) and excess redundant information. Recently, precoding techniques has been investigated for PAPR reduction. Due to its low complexity and reduced cost of implementation this technique is an attractive emerging method that yields a substantial reduction of PAPR. In this paper, a novel precoding based on Hadamard Selected Mapping (HSLM) method and genetic algorithm (GA) has been proposed for PAPR reduction in OFDM systems. © 2017 IEEE.