A low-complexity ESPRIT algorithm for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is devised in this work. Unlike the conventional subspace based methods, the proposed scheme only needs to calculate two sub-matrices of the sample covariance matrix, that is, R 11∈ C K× K and R 21∈ C (M− K)× K, avoiding its complete computation. Here, M is the number of sensors of the array, K satisfies P≤ K≤ min (M, N) with P being the number of source signals and N being the number of snapshots. Meanwhile, a Nyström-based approach is utilized to correctly compute the signal subspace which only requires O (MK 2) flops. Thus, the proposed method has the advantage of computational attractiveness, particularly when K⪡ M. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic variances of the estimated DOAs. Numerical results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed DOA estimator.