The invention provides a method and an apparatus for estimating frequency deviation, the method comprising: after receiving a sub-frame, transforming a downlink synchronized code of the sub-frame to a frequency domain, and performing a correlation operation between the transformed downlink synchronized code and a local frequency domain synchronized code to obtain a conjugate downlink synchronized code sequence; judging a location of a maximum value in the conjugate downlink synchronized code sequence, and calculating a frequency deviation value according to the location of the maximum value. The estimating method provided in the invention can realize a stable work with no need of a precise sampling value location, an accurate timing synchronization, or even obtaining the information for the multi-path distribution and locations.