A queue monitoring system and method determines when one or more transmit queues have reached a state that requires action by the host processing device, without the need for periodic polling of transmit status or excessive interrupt servicing. The queue monitoring implements an interrupt mechanism that generates an interrupt if one or more of the transmit queues has gone from a non-empty state to an empty state, and remained in the empty state for a (programmable) period of time. The combination of queue status checking (when adding new transmit data) with the queue monitoring interrupt mechanism removes the need for periodic polling of queue status and handling of interrupts generation on the completed transmission of data from one or more transmit buffer.