A transmission method for a common message and a device may be used in a machine-to-machine (M2M) application based on a long term evolution (LTE) network, which relates to a field of communication technologies and for effectively ensuring that both a low cost machine type communication (MTC) terminal and a normal LTE terminal may reliably receive the common message, where the transmission method includes determining common message transmission time instances corresponding to a first terminal, wherein the common message transmission time instances corresponding to the first terminal are a part of time instances of cell common message transmission time instances, and sending a common message at the determined common message transmission time instances corresponding to the first terminal, a bandwidth of frequency resources used for sending the common message being no larger than a data processing bandwidth that the first terminal is capable of supporting.