The present invention is designed to make possible adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) that supports high-order modulation schemes. The adaptive modulation and coding method of the present invention is an adaptive modulation and coding method for a downlink shared channel, and includes, in a user terminal, the steps of measuring channel quality based on a reference signal from the radio base station, acquiring a channel quality indicator to indicate the modulation scheme and the coding rate that are applicable to the downlink shared channel in the channel quality, from a table in which channel quality indicators, modulation schemes and coding rates are associated with each other, and transmitting the channel quality indicator to the radio base station, and the modulation schemes include a modulation scheme of a higher order than 64 QAM.