This paper presents a multistage transmission expansion planning (TEP) which alleviates the level of transmission congestion during the planning horizon. Due to the combinatorial nature of the proposed TEP model, a Benders decomposition approach intertwined with a manipulated disjunctive model is applied to decompose the original TEP problem into a master problem and two sub-problems standing for system security and optimal operation. The security sub-problem applying the N−1 contingency criterion to assess the transmission system security. Besides, the optimal operation sub-problem makes it possible for the proposed TEP model to fulfill the optimal operation as well as to calculate the difference between system lacational marginal prices (LMPs) for all buses. Also, this model appends a specific term into the TEP objective function as the congestion level (CL) reflecting the degree of market competitiveness. Therefore, the proposed TEP model minimizes the total costs comprising the investment cost of candidate transmission lines as well as the level of transmission congestion. The proposed approach is applied to the northeastern area of the Iranian power grid.