Embodiments of the present invention disclose a polar polar code encoding and decoding method and an apparatus. The decoding method may include: obtaining a polar polar code a code length N of the polar polar; determining a survivor path quantity L of the polar polar code according to the code length N of the polar polar code and a signal-to-noise ratio SNR for receiving the polar polar code, where L is a positive integer; and performing successive cancellation list SCL decoding on the polar polar code according to the survivor path quantity L, to obtain L survivor paths, and checking at least one of the L survivor paths, to obtain a decoding result of the polar polar code. The present invention can address a prior-art disadvantage that decoding is rather complex because of a fixed survivor path quantity L for polar code decoding.