The embodiments of the present disclosure provide a method and an apparatus for connection handling. The method includes: receiving a connection request that requests for establishing or resuming a connection with a base station; and instructing a Non-Access Stratum (NAS) of a terminal to perform a predetermined operation based on an obtained first connection result corresponding to the connection request. In this way, the problems associated with inconsistent operations in the user plane optimization in the related art can be solved and the consistency in operations between the Access Stratum (AS) and NAS of the terminal can be achieved.