This brief concentrates on adaptive 2-bit-triggered tracking control for unknown nonlinear systems with actuator dead-zone. By introducing the low-complexity technique, a structurally simple and computationally efficient controller is constructed to handle the issues of actuator dead-zone and complexity explosion. Meanwhile, a 2-bit-triggered mechanism is installed in the controller part to improve the communication efficiency. Different from the previous event-triggered strategy, the proposed 2-bit-triggered strategy only needs to transmit 2-bit digital numbers for the triggered updates of the control input. The counter-evidence approach proves that the system output is capable of tracking a desired trajectory accurately with tracking errors being limited within prescribed performance functions. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified by the simulation results.