With the advancements in the development of low power and limited broadcast range wireless ad hoc networks that support high data rate applications, the probability of information loss due to congestion is very high. One important factor is the timely detection of congestion that significantly improves the performance of the network. Currently most of the solutions either try to periodically/continuously examine the residual buffer space of the node or monitor the link utilisation. These types of solutions either consume high energy and processing or increase the link utilisation for the control packets that leads to the performance degradation of the network. To address this problem, a novel node/link level congestion detection approach (NLCA) has been proposed to timely detect congestion with the minimal processing overhead. The node-level congestion is detected by using the traditional mechanism of examining the buffer utilisation. However, the link-level congestion is detected by using a novel procedure that examines the wireless link utilisation with the counter maintained in CSMA/CA back-off stage. The instantaneous throughput based on the simulation analysis performed in ns-2.35 shows that NLCA can be used to timely detect congestion in the network. © 2016 IEEE.