Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging mode of wireless communication that supports both illumination and communication. One essential function of VLC systems is the dimming control, which requires a sensitive receiver for low-light conditions. The use of an array of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) is one promising approach to enhancing receivers’ sensitivity in a VLC system. However, because of the non-linear effects brought on by the SPAD dead time, an increase in the brightness of the light might degrade its performance. In this paper, an adaptive SPAD receiver is proposed for VLC systems to ensure reliable operation under various dimming levels. In the proposed receiver, a variable optical attenuator (VOA) is used to adaptively control the SPAD’s incident photon rate according to the instantaneous received optical power so that SPAD operates in its optimal conditions. The application of the proposed receiver in systems with various modulation schemes is investigated. When binary on–off keying (OOK) modulation is employed due to its good power efficiency, two dimming control methods of the IEEE 802.15.7 standard based on analogue and digital dimming are considered. We also investigate the application of the proposed receiver in the spectral efficient VLC systems with multi-carrier modulation schemes, i.e., direct current (DCO) and asymmetrically clipped optical (ACO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Through extensive numerical results, it is demonstrated that the suggested adaptive receiver outperforms the conventional PIN PD and SPAD array receivers in terms of bit error rate (BER) and achievable data rate.