The Long Term Evolution (LTE) of mobile communication standard was designed by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) to serve the requirements. Nowadays, the combining of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is supported in LTE system. The MIMO-OFDM is considered to improve data rate and channel capacity without additional bandwidth. Because the receivers get all transmission signals from all transmitters at the same time, many detection schemes have been developed for accurate estimation and low complexity. Among the detection schemes, the QR decomposition with M algorithm (QRD-M) achieves optimal error performance with low complexity. Nevertheless, the conventional QRD-M has high complexity for implementation. To overcome the problem, this letter proposes the low complexity QRD-M detection scheme in MIMO-OFDM systems. The proposed scheme has two elements which decide layer value and the limited candidates. The two elements are defined by the number of transmit antennas and the cardinality of modulation set respectively. From simulation results, the proposed scheme has the same error performance with the conventional QRD-M and very lower complexity than the conventional QRD-M.