Disclosed is a 5G or pre-5G communication system for supporting a data transmission rate higher than that of a 4G communication system such as long term evolution (LTE). Disclosed is a method by which a terminal transmits a buffer status report (BSR) in a communication system, including allocating an uplink resource from a base station; comparing the number of padding bits with a value obtained by summing the size of the BSR and the size of a sub-header of the BSR; and transmitting, to the base station according to the comparison result, the BSR including information indicating the presence or absence of a field representing a buffer size for at least one logical channel group (LCG).