Embodiments of the present invention disclose a method, an apparatus, and a terminal for determining a transmission mode, which relate to the field of communications technologies and are invented to enable a selection of a transmission mode with lower power consumption for a terminal to reduce the power consumption of the terminal. The method includes: selecting a transmission mode for a terminal according to a network resource condition; judging whether the selected transmission mode matches according to capability information reported by the terminal and if the selected transmission mode matches, setting the transmission mode as a current transmission mode of the terminal. The embodiments of the present invention are mainly applicable to a Long Term Evolution Advance (LTE-A) system.