In order to solve the huge data problem for high resolution or ultra-high resolution video, the International Organization for Standardization in video coding has been developing the most advanced video compression standard – High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), namely H.265. As an important part of this standard, the complexity and performance of intra-coding will seriously affect the compression complexity and performance of the standard. To reduce the complexity of HEVC intra-coding, an algorithm of re-determining the candidate mode list was presented is this paper. In the proposed algorithm, according to the different modes of the first index in candidate mode list, an adaptive method was utilized to determine which mode will be kept in candidate mode list, then the number of modes which are needed to perform rate distortion optimization was reduced. Experimental results show that, compared with original HM8.0, the proposed algorithm saves 24.50% on average in time for intra-coding with the same compression performance. The proposed algorithm can be combined with other level of fast coding optimization to further reduce the complexity.