Deadbeat predictive current control (DPCC) has attracted wide attention of scholars in recent years owing to its advantage of fast dynamic response, and a lot of research results have been achieved. To improve the low-speed steady-state performance of DPCC for permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM), a modified dead-time compensation method is proposed. First, the voltage error caused by the dead-time and the nonlinearity of an inverter is analyzed. Second, the d- and q-axis reference currents are utilized to replace the filtered currents, and three-phase current reconstruction is carried out considering the one-step delay in DPCC. Finally, the influence of current polarity on voltage error calculation is analyzed, and a modified sine function is adopted instead of the conventional switching function to calculate the compensation voltage. Three DPCC methods were compared experimentally, i.e., no dead-time compensation, conventional dead-time compensation and the proposed dead-time compensation algorithm. Results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively eliminate the current distortion at the zero-crossing point and further reduce the current harmonics.