In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), congestion occurs, for example, when nodes are densely distributed, and/or the application produces high flow rate near the sink due to the convergent nature of upstream traffic. Congestion may cause packet loss, which in turn lowers throughput and wastes energy. Therefore congestion in WSNs needs to be controlled for high energy-efficiency, to prolong system lifetime, improve fairness, and improve quality of service (QoS) in terms of throughput (or link utilization) and packet loss ratio along with the packet delay. This paper proposes a node priority-based congestion control protocol (PCCP) for wireless sensor networks. In PCCP, node priority index is introduced to reflect the importance of each node. PCCP uses packet interarrival time along with packet service time to measure a parameter defined as congestion degree and furthermore imposes hop-by-hop control based on the measured congestion degree as well as the node priority index. PCCP controls congestion faster and more energy-efficienty than other known techniques.