Maintaining rural highways is crucial in ensuring the reliability and efficiency of transportation infrastructure in modern rural areas. Rural highways often suffer heavy traffic from logistics and regular transportation users. The efficient management of these roads is essential to avoid issues like traffic bottlenecks, fuel consumption, and environmental problems. Traditional maintenance approaches focus on cost reduction, which can lead to adverse effects such as network congestion and environmental damage. To address these challenges, this study proposes a bi-level mathematical programming model aiming at optimizing rural highway maintenance. This model balances maintenance costs, network congestion, system fuel consumption, and environmental impacts. By transforming the bi-level model into a single-level mixed-integer linear programming model, the study enhances the computational feasibility, enabling practical implementation using commercial solvers. The model’s effectiveness is validated through numerical examples, providing insights for the development of optimal maintenance schedules that minimize externality costs while adhering to financial constraints and operational guidelines, providing a valuable addition to the road engineer’s toolbox.