Accurate placement of pilot tones has been a crucial task in multicarrier transmission technologies since there is a strong relation between pilot positions and channel estimation performance. Therefore, the firefly algorithm (FA) is proposed for achieving the optimal pilot distribution by optimizing the pilot positions in order to minimize the estimation errors of the least squares algorithm employed in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-interleave division multiple access (OFDM-IDMA) systems. According to the simulation results, our proposed FA-based pilot optimizer provides a great performance increase in OFDM-IDMA systems by obtaining the most appropriate pilot distribution pattern among the considered pilot placement strategies. The upper bound of mean square error (MSE) is used as the fitness function in the optimization process for avoiding the matrix inversion operation that is needed when calculating MSE itself.