This application provides a radio resource control (RRC) message sending method and an apparatus. According to the method, a distributed unit (DU) determines not to start an RLC polling mechanism when sending an RRC message to a terminal device, so that when sending the RRC message to UE, the DU sets a polling bit in a header of an RLC PDU carrying the RRC message to be in an inactive state. Therefore, after receiving the RRC message, the terminal device does not feed back an RLC status report to the DU. Therefore, the terminal device does not need to initiate a random access procedure to obtain an uplink transmission resource for sending the RLC status report to the DU, thereby saving random access resources.