In this paper, we propose a noise whitening decision feedback equalizer for single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) receivers. SC-FDMA has the same advantage as that of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) in which the multipath effect can be removed easily, and also solves the problem of high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) which is the main drawback of OFDMA. Although SC-FDMA is a single carrier transmission scheme, a simple frequency domain linear equalizer (FD-LE) can be implemented as in OFDMA, which can dramatically reduce the equalizer complexity. Moreover, some residual intersymbol interference in the output of the FD-LE can be further removed by an additional nonlinear decision feedback equalizer (DFE) in time domain, because the time domain signal is a digitally modulated symbol. In the conventional DFE, however, the noise is not white at the input of the decision device and correspondingly the decision is not optimum. In this paper, we propose an improved DFE scheme for SC-FDMA systems where a linear noise whitening filter is inserted before the decision device of the conventional DFE scheme. Through computer simulations, we compare the bit error rate performance of the proposed DFE scheme with the conventional equalizers.