High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the most recent video coding standard to achieve a higher coding performance than the previous H.264/AVC. In order to accomplish this improved coding performance, HEVC adopted several advanced coding tools; however, these cause heavy computational complexity. Similar to previous video coding standards, motion estimation (ME) of HEVC requires the most computational complexity; this is because ME is conducted for three inter prediction modes - namely, uniprediction in list 0, uniprediction in list 1, and biprediction. In this paper, we propose an efficient inter prediction mode (EIPM) decision method to reduce the complexity of ME. The proposed EIPM method computes the priority of all inter prediction modes and performs ME only on a selected inter prediction mode. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces computational complexity arising from ME by up to 51.76% and achieves near similar coding performance compared to HEVC test model version 10.1.