Energy savings in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is an active research area. In order to achieve a solution, we propose a new cooperative relaying scheme operated on a per subcarrier basis. This scheme improves the bit error rate (BER) performance of the conventional signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR)‐based selection relaying scheme by substituting SNR with symbol error probability (SEP) to evaluate the received signal quality at the relay more reliably. Since the cooperative relaying provides spatial diversity gain for each subcarrier, thus statistically enhancing the reliability of subcarriers at the destination, the total number of lost subcarriers due to deep fading is reduced. In other words, cooperative relaying can alleviate error symbols in a codeword so that the error correction capability of forward error correction codes can be fully exploited to improve the BER performance (or save transmission energy at a target BER). Monte‐Carlo simulations validate the proposed approach.