This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA-96, held in New Brunswick, NJ, USA, in July 1996.The 27 revised full papers presented in this volume were selected from a total of 84 submissions, also included are six system descriptions and abstracts of three invited papers. The topics covered include analysis of term rewriting systems, string and graph rewriting, rewrite-based theorem proving, conditional term rewriting, higher-order rewriting, unification, symbolic and algebraic computation, and efficient implementation of rewriting on sequential and parallel machines.