Embodiments of the present invention provide a cell selection and reselection method and apparatus, so as to resolve a problem existing in the prior art that repeated reception of data by using an existing cell selection and reselection method causes a waste of resources and an increase in power consumption. The cell selection method includes: measuring signal quality of a cell, and acquiring a coverage class offset value that is preconfigured by a network side for the cell; and selecting a target cell according to the signal quality of the cell and the acquired coverage class offset value of the cell.