The paper introduces a new two-level time-mesh difference scheme for solving the symmetric regularized long wave equation. The scheme consists of three steps. A coarse time-mesh and a fine time-mesh are defined, and the equation is solved using an existing nonlinear scheme on the coarse time-mesh. Lagrange’s linear interpolation formula is employed to obtain all preliminary solutions on the fine time-mesh. Based on the preliminary solutions, Taylor’s formula is utilized to construct a linear system for the equation on the fine time-mesh. The convergence and stability of the scheme is analyzed, providing the convergence rates of O(τF2+τC4+h4) in the discrete L∞-norm for u(x,t) and in the discrete L2-norm for ρ(x,t). Numerical simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves equivalent error levels and convergence rates to the nonlinear scheme, while also reducing CPU time by over half, which indicates that the new method is more efficient. Furthermore, compared to the earlier time two-mesh method developed by the authors, the proposed scheme significantly reduces the error between the numerical and exact solutions, which means that the proposed scheme is more accurate. Additionally, the effectiveness of the new scheme is discussed in terms of the corresponding conservation laws and long-time simulations.