The present invention discloses a packet forwarding method, including: determining, by an ingress provider edge Ingress PE in an Ethernet virtual private network instance EVI, that a state of the EVI on a first egress Egress PE is active Active, where an Ethernet virtual private network EVPN corresponding to the EVI includes a first CE; determining, by the Ingress PE, that a state of the EVI on a second Egress PE is inactive Inactive; skipping, by the Ingress PE, forwarding a broadcast, unknown unicast, or multicast BUM packet to the second Egress PE, where the BUM packet is from the first CE; and forwarding, by the Ingress PE, the BUM packet to the first Egress PE. Repeated BUM traffic that is transmitted in a bearer network and is not finally sent to a remote site is reduced; therefore, a waste of bandwidth in the bearer network is reduced.