Embodiments of the present invention provide a reference signal transmission method and user equipment. The method includes: determining, by a first user equipment, a first identifier related to the first user equipment; determining, by the first user equipment, a first cyclic shift indication from to-be-selected cyclic shift indications according to the first identifier; determining, by the first user equipment, first reference signal according to the first cyclic shift indication and a preset base sequence; and sending, by the first user equipment, the first reference signal to second user equipment, thereby implementing reference signal transmission in D2D communication.