Embodiments of the present invention provide a method for feeding back channel state information, a user equipment, and a base station, to improve feedback precision of channel state information. The method includes: receiving a reference signal sent by a base station; selecting a precoding matrix W from a codebook according to the reference signal, where a column vector of the precoding matrix W may be expressed as α[v ejφv]T, v=[1 ejθ]; and sending a precoding matrix indicator PMI to the base station, where the PMI is corresponding to the selected precoding matrix W. The present invention may further improve quantization precision and achieve balance between overheads and the quantization precision. The base station performs precoding on a sent signal according to a fed back precoding matrix indicator, which can improve precoding precision, thereby improving a data transmission rate and system throughput.