Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of communications, and disclose a carrier status indication method and a device, which can reduce a delay of indicating an activated state or a deactivated state of a carrier, and improve efficiency of indicating the activated state or deactivated state of the carrier. A specific solution is as follows: determining, by a base station, a carrier status of a carrier, where the carrier status is an activated state or a deactivated state; indicating first carrier information to user equipment by using a downlink physical control channel, where the first carrier information includes the carrier status of the carrier, and the first carrier information is used to enable the user equipment to perform communication on the carrier according to the carrier status. The present invention is applied in a carrier switching process.