Restricted Pade schemes R m p where the denominator is a complete power p of a linear function have been examined analytically by Norsett. Here this method is evaluated with paying special attention to numerical aspects when solving typical finite-element systems in structural dynamics with n degrees of freedom and with essential properties like sparsety and symmetry.This paper presents an efficient implicit restricted time-stepping scheme R 2 2 with a final coefficient matrix of order n and a leading error term proportional to h 4 . This is a significant improvement compared with the most popular Pade-P 1 1 -Newmark scheme with matrix order n, too, but error term h 3 on the one hand and the well established Pade-P 1 2 -discontinuous Hamiltonian approach with error term h 4 but matrix order 2xn on the other hand.The classical P 1 1 -scheme and the new restricted R 2 2 -scheme are compared in a modal manner and by assessing the correlation between local error estimator and global error.