We combine Wooley's efficient congruencing method with earlier work of Vinogradov and Hua to get effective bounds on Vinogradov's mean value theorem.with 0 < x, y ≤ X. By orthogonality the number of solutions is equal tofor real N, M with M ≥ 1 and ϑ(x) = (x, x 2 , . . . , x k ). Lower bounds for J s,k (X) are well-known and easily proved (see for example [14]). They admit the formIn a recent breakthrough Bourgain, Demeter and Guth [2] have shown that (1.2) is sharp up to a factor X ǫ ; i.e. they have proven the inequality (1.3) J s,k (X) ≪ s,k,ǫ max{X s+ǫ , X 2s− 1 2 k(k+1)+ǫ } 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 11P55 (11L07, 11L15, 11D45). Key words and phrases. Exponential sums, Hardy-Littlewood method, Effective Vinogradov's mean value theorem. 1 be an integer and set θ = k −(D+1) . Then we have J s,k (X) ≤C · 2Iterating this theorem combined with the Hardy-Littlewood method one may conclude the following result, which is a special case of Theorem 7.3.Theorem 1.2. Let k ≥ 3, s ≥ 5 2 k 2 + k. Furthermore let X ≥ s 10 . Then we have the estimate J s,k (X) ≤ CX 2s− 1 2 k(k+1) ,