The rectilinear Steiner tree problem (RSTP) is to find a minimum-length rectilinear interconnection of a set of terminals in the plane. It is well known that the solution to this problem will be the minimal spanning tree(MST) on some set Steiner points. The RSTP is known to be NP-complete. The RSTP has received a lot of attention in the literature and heuristic and optimal algorithms have been proposed. A key performance measure of the algorithm for the RSTP is the reduction rate that is achieved by the difference between the objective value of the RSTP and that of the MST without Steiner points. A hybrid evolutionary strategy on RSTP based upon nodes set is presented. The computational results show that the hybrid evolutionary strategy is better than the previously proposed other heuristic. The average reduction rate of solutions from the evolutionary strategy is about 11.14%, which is almost similar to that of optimal solutions.