The universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC) system is one of the novel candidate waveforms for 5G systems. UFMC is expected to achieve low latency, robustness against frequency offset, and reduce out-of-band (OoB) radiation that leads to a higher spectral efficiency. Although, the UFMC system offers many advantages as mentioned before, but being a multicarrier transmission technology, it suffers from high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, a modified selected mapping (SLM) approach with low-complexity is proposed for reducing PAPR in UFMC systems. The main idea of the proposed modified SLM (P-SLM) approach is to utilize the linearity property of the UFMC modulator. The P-SLM approach generates U w alternative UFMC waveforms using U m UFMC modulators, where U m is the square-root of U w. Therefore, the computational complexity of the P-SLM approach is reduced compared to the existing SLM based PAPR reduction approaches for UFMC systems. The P-SLM approach is compared to the other approaches found in the literature in terms of PAPR reduction ability, bit error rate (BER) performance, and the computational complexity.