Future broadband wireless communication standards are expected to offer high-quality services under all mobility conditions. Achieving high-quality services in a wireless fading environment is a challenging task. To combat the effect of frequency selective fading, recent wireless standards prefer multicarrier modulation schemes such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) instead of single carrier modulation. The high mobility of the users leads to a larger amount of inter-carrier interference (ICI) in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems and thus the spectral efficiency reduces. Achieving higher spectral efficiency by combating the effect of ICI with reasonable complexity is the essence of this paper. Considering carrier frequency offset (CFO) pre-correction schemes along with adaptive subcarrier spacing (ASS)-adaptive bit loading (ABL) algorithms, we present the modified adaptive subcarrier spacing (MASS) resource allocation algorithm to cancel ICI and to increase spectral efficiency. The simulation results show that the MASS algorithm is far better than the conventional ASS-ABL algorithm in terms of spectral efficiency. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.