This paper studies the problem of guaranteed cost control for a class of switched recurrent neural networks with interval time-varying delay. The time delay is a continuous function belonging to a given interval, but not necessary differentiable. A cost function is considered as a nonlinear performance measure for the closed-loop system. The stabilizing controllers to be designed must satisfy some exponential stability constraints on the closed-loop poles. By constructing a set of augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals, a guaranteed cost controller is designed via memoryless state feedback control, a switching rule for the exponential stabilization for the system is designed via linear matrix inequalities and new sufficient conditions for the existence of the guaranteed cost state-feedback for the system are given in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained result. © 2013 Niamsup et al.; licensee Springer.