Machine to machine communication (M2M) or machine type communication (MTC) facilitates communication of two network enabled devices, without any human intervention, to take some intelligent decision based on the interaction of devices. Because of ubiquitous coverage and global connectivity, cellular networks are playing a major role in the deployment of M2M communications. Due to some unique characteristics of M2M communication, supporting M2M applications in cellular networks is very challenging. One of such challenge is congestion in radio access network (RAN) during RACH procedure. This is because of the fact that there are large numbers of M2M devices which access the radio network at the same time. As a solution, we propose an adaptive RACH congestion management function (ARC) which specifies congestion handling method to be used by all M2M devices based on the current congestion condition of the network. © 2013 IEEE.