The present invention discloses a pilot sequence transmission method and apparatus. A terminal device determines a first pilot number, determines a first pilot sequence and a second pilot sequence according to the first pilot number, respectively maps the first pilot sequence and the second pilot sequence to a first OFDM symbol and a second OFDM symbol of a grant free transmission resource, and sends the first pilot sequence and the second pilot sequence by using the first OFDM symbol and the second OFDM symbol. Therefore, a network device can determine activeness of the terminal device by detecting the first pilot sequence, and can detect only the second pilot sequence corresponding to the first pilot sequence, and does not need to detect all possible second pilot sequences, so that a quantity of detected pilots can be significantly reduced, and pilot detection complexity is reduced.