diff --git a/vllm/v1/core/sched/scheduler.py b/vllm/v1/core/sched/scheduler.py
index 208b5a679e72..c2b41594d6a2 100644
--- a/vllm/v1/core/sched/scheduler.py
+++ b/vllm/v1/core/sched/scheduler.py
@@ -1160,6 +1160,15 @@ def schedule(self, throttle_prefills: bool = False) -> SchedulerOutput:
                 self.dynamic_sd_lookup[len(num_scheduled_tokens)],
             )
 
+        # Skip spec decode when all scheduled requests need ≤1 output token.
+        # Speculative decoding is useless for 1-token outputs and adds ~40ms
+        # of draft generation + verification overhead.
+        if num_spec_tokens_to_schedule > 0:
+            if (scheduled_new_reqs
+                    and not scheduled_running_reqs
+                    and all(req.max_tokens <= 1 for req in scheduled_new_reqs)):
+                num_spec_tokens_to_schedule = 0
+
         scheduled_encoder_input_stats = None
         if (
             self.log_stats