A
polar code encoding method and an apparatus are provided and relate to the field of communication technologies, to enable polar codes to be constructed based on a same reliability sequence and a same first matrix for sequences of different quantities of information bits, thereby reducing
hardware complexity and improving decoding performance. The method includes: mapping, based on a reliability sequence whose length is N, an information bit sequence whose length is k to k bits of a first sequence whose length is N, to obtain a second sequence including k information bit positions, x PC bit positions, and N-k-x frozen bit positions; multiplying the second sequence by a first matrix to obtain a third sequence; and performing polar encoding to obtain a fourth sequence, where k≤K≤N, 1≤x, K is a maximum value of the length of the information bit sequence, k, K, N, and x are all positive integers, there are all 0s below a
diagonal of the first matrix, and all 1s on the
diagonal, a column weight of a column corresponding to the PC bit position in the first matrix is greater than 1, a column weight of a column corresponding to the frozen bit position or the information bit position is equal to 1, and a quantity of columns whose column weights are greater than 1 is less than or equal to N-K.