The rural postman problem with time windows is the problem of serving some required edges with one vehicle; the vehicle must visit these edges during established time windows. This article presents a competitive adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm to solve the problem. Computational experiments are performed on a large set of instances with up to 104 required edges. The results show that this approach is efficient, significantly reducing the computational time on large instances and achieving good solutions: the algorithm is able to solve to optimality 224 of 232 instances. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 70(1), 44–59 2017