Disclosed are an encoding device and encoding method capable of improving the quality of a decoded signal under very low bit rate conditions using a small amount of computation. A spectrum correction unit (302) performs correction processing on the subspectrum in each subband in such a manner that samples equal to or greater than a subspectrum average value are left unchanged while samples smaller than the subspectrum average value are replaced by zero. As a result of this, it is possible to significantly reduce the number of bits required to quantize the subspectrums without substantial reduction in quality in a local search unit (303) and in a multi-rate indexing unit (304).