Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an attractive technique to realize high data rate in light emitting diodes (LEDs)-based visible light communication (VLC). However, high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM makes VLC-OFDM very sensitive to the nonlinearity of LEDs. In this paper, the discrete Fourier transform- spread (DFT-spread) combined with clipping method is proposed to reduce the PAPR of OFDM signal in VLC system. Combining simulation with experiment, a performance comparison is made among conventional OFDM, DFT-spread-OFDM, and clipped DFT-spread-OFDM with different clipping ratios (CRs) in a single LED-based VLC system. The experimental results show that the proposed clipped DFT-spread-OFDM method can effectively improve the system performance compared with the other two methods. At the optimum signal peak-to-peak (PTP) value, by using the clipped DFT-spread-OFDM scheme with CR at 8 dB, the bit error rate (BER) of the system can be reduced from 0.003 7 to 0.000 287.