A numerical investigation of the unsteady motion of a deformed drop released freely in another quiescent liquid contaminated by surfactant is presented in this paper. The finite difference method was used to solve numerically the coupled time-dependent Navier-Stokes and convective-diffusion equations in a body-fitted orthogonal coordinate system. Numerical simulation was conducted on the experimental cases, in which MIBK drops with the size ranging from 1.24 mm to 1.97 mm rose and accelerated freely in pure water and in dilute sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) aqueous solution. The applicability of the numerical scheme was validated by the agreement between the simulation results and the experimental data. Both the numerical and experimental results showed that the velocitytime profile exhibited a maximum rising velocity for drops in SDS solutions, which was close to the terminal velocity in pure water, before it dropped down to a steady-state value. The effect of the sorption kinetics of surfactant on the accelerating motion was also evaluated. It is also suggested that introduction of virtual mass force into the formulation improved obviously the precision of numerical simulation of transient drop motion.