The inverter dead time effect is non-negligible for the control performance of sensorless synchronous reluctance motor (SynRM) drives at low speeds. In this paper, a reduced-order observer-based sensorless control method for SynRM drives combined with the adaptive linear neurons (ADALINE)-based dead-time compensation is proposed. The reduced-order observer-based sensorless control method is presented, for which is parameter tuning is easy. On this basis, the dead-time compensation strategy using ADALINE filters is proposed to reduce the voltage harmonics effect on the estimation performance of the reduced-order observer. With ADALINE filters, the sixth current harmonic can be successfully filtered out by compensating the voltage directly or fitting the current to compensate the voltage. In this way, the low-speed estimation performance of the reduced-order observer is improved. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on a 3 kW SynRM experimental platform.