Embodiments of the present invention disclose a base station, user terminal, and a carrier scheduling indication method, and relate to the communications field, so as to resolve a problem that signaling overheads are relatively large because a quantity of configured carriers of the base station is relatively large. A specific solution is: generating, by a processing unit, a CAI field of a current scheduled carrier according to scheduling statuses of all configured carriers, where the CAI field is used to indicate a total quantity of scheduled carriers in all the configured carriers and an accumulative index value M of the current scheduled carrier, and M represents that the current scheduled carrier is the M th scheduled carrier from the 1 st configured carrier to the current scheduled carrier; or the CAI field is used to indicate a number of a preceding scheduled carrier of the current scheduled carrier and a number of a next scheduled carrier of the current scheduled carrier; and sending, by a sending unit, downlink control information DCI, by carrying the CAI field generated by the processing unit to the DCI, to UE by using the current scheduled carrier The present invention is applied to a carrier scheduling indication process.