Disclosed in the embodiments of the present invention are a method for processing a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) process, a device and a communications system. The method comprises: during the process of performing uplink scheduling for a terminal, determining a target HARQ process set from multiple HARQ process sets,, the target HARQ process set comprising an uplink HARQ process allocated to uplink sub-frames scheduled for the terminal, none of the uplink HARQ processes in the target HARQ process set being occupied, the scheduled uplink sub-frames corresponding to the uplink HARQ processes in the target HARQ process set; extracting the serial set number of the target HARQ process set; and sending to the terminal the serial set number of the target HARQ process set. The embodiments of the present invention can be implemented to allocate HARQ processes to uplink sub-frames of which the distributed positions are unfixed.
