A scheme that jointly estimates carrier frequency offset and channel is proposed for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In the proposed scheme, the carrier frequency offset (CFO) and the channel state information (CSI) are first estimated by an minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator and an maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, respectively. By exchanging the estimation information between these two estimators, the final estimation of CFO and CSI is then obtained by an iterative method. In the iterative process, the effect of imperfect CSI is considered. It can improve the estimation precision for a shorter preamble and accelerate the iterative convergence rate. To reduce the complexity of the proposed scheme, a procedure is adopted to eliminate the inverse operation of covariance matrix that is recalculated at each iteration. In addition, a sufficient condition for the convergence of the proposed method is deduced. The numerical simulation results show that the BER performance of our scheme is better than that of joint MLE for a shorter preamble and is comparable to that of joint MLE for a longer preamble. Furthermore, the average iterative time of our method is reduced by half as compared to the MLE methods without considering the effect of imperfect CSI.