The invention provides a 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) demodulation synchronization method. The method comprises a first step of adding a power detection technology on a traditional costas loop of quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) so as to finish carrier recovery; a second step of performing matched filtering on each same-phase orthogonal component signal, so as to reduce noise effect and prepare for bit synchronization; a third step of performing bit timing recovery on same-phase orthogonal signals through an "early-late gate"; a fourth step of setting a threshold, and performing sampling judgment and 4-2 level conversion on each of two paths of signal to obtain parallel signals; and a fifth step of performing differential decoding and parallel-serial conversion on the parallel signals, then recovering and obtaining original signals. According to the introduced novel carrier synchronization technology, the carrier recovery is finished by using a phase-locked loop; on the basis of the traditional costas loop, the power detection technology is added, so that the linear output of a phase discriminator is guaranteed, the tracking precision and speed are improved, and the novel carrier synchronization technology passes field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware verification.