Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) provide high data rates with flexible bandwidth allocation and good signal cell coverage that makes their application really promising in forthcoming years. Despite its broadly recognized benefits, the high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) is still one of the major drawbacks in the transmitted OFDMA signals. In this paper, we present a zadoff-chu matrix transform (ZCMT) precoding based distributed OFDMA uplink system for PAPR reduction. The proposed system is based on precoding the constellation symbols with ZCMT precoder. Extensive computer simulations have been performed to analyze the PAPR of the proposed system with pulse shaping. Simulation results show that, proposed system has better PAPR gain than the hadamard transform (WHT) precoded distributed OFDMA uplink systems and the conventional distributed OFDMA uplink systems. © 2011 IEEE.