The estimation of the time difference of arrival (TDOA) consists of the determination of the travel-time of a wavefront between two spatially separated receivers , and it is the first step of processing systems dedicated to the identification, localization and tracking of radiating sources. This article presents a TDOA estima-tor based on cross recurrence plots and on recurrence quantification analysis. Six recurrence quantification analyses measures are considered for this purpose, including two new ones that we propose in this article. Simulated signals are used to study the influence of the parameters of the cross recurrence plot, such as the embedding dimension, the similarity function, and the recurrence threshold, on the reliability and effectiveness of the estimator. Finally, the proposed method is validated on real underwater acoustic data, for which the cross recurrence plot estimates correctly 77.6% of the TDOAs, whereas the classical cross-correlation estimates correctly only 70.2% of the TDOAs.