Network coding is significantly able to save system resources for wireless networks, and has been widely studied for the 802.11 wireless local area network and traditional cellular networks. The relay technology was introduced in 802.16j, 802.16m, and Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) standards. Recently, the application of network coding to multi-hop wireless relay networks has been taken into consideration. Although the introduction of relay stations (RSs) may bring more energy consumption, it provides opportunities for network coding to save spectrum resources. Nevertheless, the benefits of network coding are diminished by high multiuser diversity based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). For ensuring the superiority, network coding is performed opportunistically according to the channel state. Hence dynamic resource allocation (DRA) subject to rate constraints is combined with the idea of opportunistic network coding to minimize the total transmission power in a frame. A fixed set of discrete modulation levels in an OFDMA relay system is also considered. By taking the characteristic of a half-duplex decode-and-forward (DF) mode relay, a solution is proposed for the optimal problem of each subframe after separating power-aware relay selection. Simulation results show that DRA with opportunistic network coding can improve system energy efficiency. Further, it is more efficient for saving energy than DRA with static network coding compared solely to DRA.