Embodiments of the present invention provide information sending and receiving methods and devices. The information sending method includes: determining, by a base station, a downlink subframe that is used to send first information to user equipment UE; and sending, by the base station, the first information to the UE by using the downlink subframe, where the downlink subframe is a first subframe, a second subframe, or a third subframe, where the first subframe includes at least two sub-physical resource block pairs, the second subframe includes at least two physical resource block pairs, and the third subframe includes at least one sub-physical resource block pair and at least one physical resource block pair. According to the embodiments of the present invention, an LTE communications system efficiently and flexibly supports various network architectures and various types of UEs.