Disclosed are a circuit and method for acquiring and updating a transparent clock. The circuit includes an MII interface monitoring module, an arrival timestamp recording module, a timer, an MAC layerprocessing module, a departure timestamp recording module, a transparent clock calculating module, a transparent clock updating module, an arrival timestamp table, and a configuration parameter table. Clock synchronization is one of key technologies in time-triggered Ethernet. The clock synchronization is to maintain the synchronization of clocks of distributed equipment, and the transparent clock technology is one of methods to achieve the clock synchronization. The invention provides a circuit realization method for acquiring and updating the transparent clock. The circuit and method have advantages of being able to quickly acquire a precise transparent clock and timely modify a transparent clock value in a synchronization message, and can provide a basic guarantee for high precision clock synchronization.