Embodiments of this application provide a network attach method and user equipment. The method is applied to UE, and includes: sending a first network attach request message to a first target gateway according to the first information; where the first information is used to indicate load information of each of M gateways; the first target gateway is at least one gateway, to which the UE has never sent a network attach request message, in the M gateways; and the first network attach request message is used to request to attach to a 3GPP network through an untrusted Wi-Fi network, where M is a positive integer.