Provided is a reference signal transmission method and device. The method includes that a base station transmits indication information to a UE through a downlink control signaling or a higher layer signaling, where the indication information includes one of: information indicating that the UE transmits a reference signal, information indicating whether the reference signal is contained in a physical downlink shared channel or a physical downlink control channel, or information indicating a transmission mode of a downlink reference signal or an uplink reference signal; or the base station pre-defines with the UE a time-frequency resource or a parameter set required by the UE or the base station to transmit the reference signal, where the time-frequency resource or the parameter set includes at least one of: a time domain symbol position, a frequency domain position, a transmission period and a subframe offset, a type of a reference signal sequence or an orthogonal mask. This solves the problem in the existing art of how to properly place a reference signal on time-frequency resources and trigger a signaling correspondingly.