In this paper, a novel efficient continuous piecewise nonlinear compand-ing scheme is proposed for reducing the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of orthog-onal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In the proposed companding trans-form, signal samples with large amplitudes is clipped for peak power reduction, and the sig-nal samples with medium amplitudes is non-linear transformed with power compensation. While the signal samples with small ampli-tudes remain unchanged. The whole compand-ing function is continuous and smooth in the range of positive numbers, which is beneficial for guaranteeing the bit error rate (BER) and power spectral density (PSD) performance. This scheme can achieve a significant reduc-tion in PAPR. And at the same time, it cause little increment in BER and PSD performance. Simulation results indicate the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing compand-ing schemes.