Disclosed are a data processing method and apparatus. The method includes: a first receiving end determines a range of a data demodulation reference signal (DMRS) ports occupied by one or more second receiving ends by using at least one of the following information: a usage state of a joint encoding table corresponding to a DMRS port group, the number of layers corresponding to a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) of the first receiving end, and the number of codewords corresponding to the PDSCH of the first receiving end; and the first receiving end processes data according to the range of the DMRS ports occupied by one or more second receiving ends.