Abstract In the fifth generation (5G) cellular system, short-packet communication is a key enabler to support critical applications, i.e., ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLCs), where finite block-length codewords are adopted. However, the short-packet communication suffers from a higher decoding error rate and has a lower transmission rate than the Shannon channel capacity. To improve both the reception reliability and the transmission efficiency, the incremental relaying (IR) is considered to improve the performance of the short-packet communication. Especially, we investigate an IR scheme for short-packet communications to reduce the transmission delay. To evaluate the system performance, closed-form expressions for the decoding error probability, the throughput and the delay are derived by considering the feedback overhead of IR. Finally, we provide simulation results to verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis, and also compare the proposed IR scheme with the direct transmission (DT) and conventional relaying transmission (RT) schemes. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed IR scheme for the short-packet communication.