Abstract Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely used in wireless communication systems due to its robustness against the frequency selectivity of fading channels. It provides optimal performance and it also meets the requirements of the next generation communication systems. Although OFDM has these advantages, its spectrum efficiency is usually degraded significantly due to the use of cyclic prefix (CP). In this paper, motivated to deal with this issue, the combined structure of Fast Walsh‐Hadamard Transform (FWHT) and Time Domain Equalizer (TDE) is proposed to use in CP‐free OFDM systems. The results validated by Monte Carlo simulations decipher the improved performances in terms of spectral efficiencies, bit error rate, peak to average power ratio and out of band emission for using this structure over frequency selective multipath fading channels in CP‐free OFDM systems. The acquired simulation results have illustrated that the proposed method provides 20% spectral efficiency without compromising the BER performance.