This application provides a communication method and a communication apparatus, relating to the field of communication technologies. In the application, a terminal device indicates, via an uplink control channel, a difference between an actual channel state of a downlink data channel and a historical channel state of the downlink data channel, enabling a network device to quickly adjust, based on the difference, a modulation and coding scheme (MCS) for downlink data channel scheduling. This helps reduce service data transmission delay and data retransmissions, thereby conserving spectrum resources.