This invention relates to methods and systems for estimating skew based on, for example, the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). These methods and systems can allow the clock skew between a master clock (server) and slave clock (client) exchanging PTP messages over a packet network to be estimated more rapidly than conventional estimation techniques and thereby improve the convergence of standard estimation algorithms. In one embodiment, the skew estimation is derived from a set of timestamps from a message exchange between the master and slave using a non-linear least square-fitting algorithm. An example of the fitting algorithm is the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm.