A method for calculating an estimate of the clock skew between a sender's clock and a receiver's clock in a packet-based communications network. An adaptive algorithm is employed in which a recursive least squares approach is used to calculate an estimate of the clock skew based on the transmission of a given (i e., the "current") packet, which estimate is further based on a previous estimate thereof ("a first approximation" thereof). This illustrative process then iterates with each new packet, producing increasingly accurate estimates of the clock skew.