This paper discusses convergence and complexity of arbitrary,but fixed,order adaptive mixed element methods for the Poisson equation in two and three dimensions.The two main ingredients in the analysis,namely the quasi-orthogonality and the discrete reliability,are achieved by use of a discrete Helmholtz decomposition and a discrete inf-sup condition.The adaptive algorithms are shown to be contractive for the sum of the error of flux in L2-norm and the scaled error estimator after each step of mesh refinement and to be quasi-optimal with respect to the number of elements of underlying partitions.The methods do not require a separate treatment for the data oscillation.