The present disclosure provides an encoding method and apparatus, and relates to the field of communications technologies, to reduce an encoding latency and complexity, and the amount of computation of real-time construction. The encoding method includes: obtaining information bits; determining a puncturing pattern, where the puncturing pattern includes an element in a puncturing set and an element in a shortening set, and the puncturing set and the shortening set have no intersection set; and performing, by using the determined puncturing pattern, rate matching on data obtained after the information bits are encoded.