The universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) technique has been proposed as a prominent waveform candidate for fifth generation (5G) communication techniques. However, UFMC systems exhibit a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which causes serious degradation in the performance of the system. Therefore, this paper puts forward an effective hybrid PAPR reduction method to reduce the high PAPR of the UFMC system. The proposed hybrid scheme consists of a combination of precoding and nonlinear companding techniques (NLCTs). A comparative analysis of the performance of different precoding methods, NLCTs, and hybrid methods are investigated in terms of the cumulative distribution function of the PAPR and the bit error rate (BER). The simulation results show that the proposed hybrid UFMC system has better PAPR reduction performance compared to conventional NLC and precoded UFMC systems. Moreover, the BER analysis of the UFMC system verifies that the proposed hybrid technique shows better BER performance compared to conventional companding techniques.INDEX TERMS Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), precoding techniques, non-linear companding techniques, hybrid PAPR reduction techniques, universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), 5G.