An embodiment of the present invention discloses a method and device for managing a forwarding plane tunnel resource, wherein the method includes: sending a forwarding plane tunnel resource request message to a forwarding plane device, for enabling the forwarding plane device to allocate a forwarding plane tunnel resource according to the forwarding plane tunnel resource request message; acquiring the allocated forwarding plane tunnel resource from the forwarding plane device; and sending the acquired forwarding plane tunnel resource to a target network element, to establish a packet data network connection with the target network element. By adopting the present invention, the load balancing of the forwarding plane device is achieved, the signaling interaction between the control plane device and the forwarding plane device is reduced as much as possible, and meanwhile, efficient failure processing can also be achieved in the case of a failure occurred in a device.