The present invention discloses a method and device for detecting transmitting antenna port configuration in a LTE system. The method includes: receiving a signal transmitted by a transmitting end at a receiving end, extracting from the signal a reference signal transmitted by each transmitting antenna port and descrambling; calculating and obtaining reference signal energy of each transmitting antenna port, dividing the reference signal energy into a first type of reference signal energy and a second type of reference signal energy, and determining a current bandwidth; and comparing the first type of reference signal energy with the second type of reference signal energy, and determining the number of transmitting antenna ports according to a comparison result. The present invention does not need to perform P-BCH blind detection multiple times to obtain the number of transmitting antenna ports, thus improving the performance of cell initial search and reducing the complexity of implementation.