We consider a least-squares/relaxation finite element method for the numerical solution of the prescribed Jacobian equation. We look for its solution via a least-squares approach. We introduce a relaxation algorithm that decouples this least-squares problem into a sequence of local nonlinear problems and variational linear problems. We develop dedicated solvers for the algebraic problems based on Newton’s method and we solve the differential problems using mixed low-order finite elements. Various numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency and the robustness of the proposed method, compared for instance to augmented Lagrangian approaches.