An apparatus and method for encoding/decoding a speech signal which determines a variable bit rate based on reserved bits obtained from a target bit rate, is provided. The variable bit rate is determined based on a source feature of the speech signal and the reserved bits is obtained based on the target bit rate. The apparatus for encoding the speech signal may include a linear predictive (LP) analysis unit/quantization unit to determine an immittance spectral frequencies (ISF) index, a closed loop pitch search unit, a fixed codebook search unit, a gain vector quantization (VQ) unit to determine a gain vector quantization (VQ) index, and a bit rate control unit to control at least two indexes of the ISF index, the pitch index, the code index, and the gain VQ index to be encoded to be variable bit rates based on a source feature of a speech signal and the reserved bits.