What's My IP Address

What Is My IP Address?

An IP address is the number that identifies your device on a network. The address shown at the top of this page is your public IP address — the one the rest of the internet sees when you make a request. Every site you visit, every API you call, and every mail server you connect to receives it, because it is the return address your packets need in order to come back to you.

Your public IP is assigned by your internet service provider, not by you or your computer. On a home connection it belongs to your router; on mobile data it belongs to your carrier's gateway; in an office it is usually a single address shared by the whole building.

Public vs. Private IP Addresses

The address your laptop or phone reports internally is almost never the one shown here. Home and office networks use private address ranges reserved by RFC 1918: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16. Addresses like 192.168.1.14 or 10.0.0.5 are private, are not routable on the public internet, and are reused on millions of networks at the same time.

Your router bridges the two worlds with NAT (Network Address Translation). It rewrites the source address of outgoing packets to its own public IP, remembers the mapping, and rewrites the replies back to the right internal device. That is why every device in your house shares one public IP, and why a web server cannot tell your laptop from your phone by IP alone. Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) applies the same trick one level up: many mobile and some fiber subscribers share a single public IPv4 address across hundreds of customers.

IPv4 vs. IPv6

IPv4 addresses are 32 bits, written as four decimal octets — 203.0.113.42. That allows about 4.3 billion addresses, which the internet exhausted years ago; NAT and address transfer markets have kept it alive.

IPv6 addresses are 128 bits, written as eight groups of four hex digits — 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334, where :: collapses one run of all-zero groups. The space is effectively unlimited, so devices can hold globally routable addresses without NAT. Most modern connections are dual-stack, which is why this page can show both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. If the IPv6 field reads "Unavailable", your network or provider simply has not enabled IPv6 — common, and harmless.

Why Your IP Address Changes

Most residential addresses are dynamic: handed out from the provider's pool by DHCP on a lease that expires and renews. Rebooting your router, a line outage, or an ordinary lease renewal can give you a different address. Moving between Wi-Fi and mobile data changes it instantly, because a different network is carrying your traffic. Static addresses, which stay fixed, are normally a paid business option and are what you need to run a reachable server or to be whitelisted in someone's firewall.

What This Page Can and Cannot See

Worth being straight about: this is the one tool on this site that is not purely client-side. A browser cannot discover its own public address on its own, so this page makes requests to third-party lookup services (ipify, ipapi and similar) and, for the map, to Google Maps. Those providers necessarily see the request, and therefore your IP, under their own privacy policies. Nothing is stored on our side — there is no backend and no database here — but the lookup itself is not private the way the rest of the tools on this site are.

The timezone, connection and browser fields are different: they are read from JavaScript APIs inside your own browser and never leave the page. And what any site learns from your IP alone is limited — an approximate location, your provider, and whether you look like a residential or datacenter connection. It does not reveal your name, your street address, your browsing history, or the contents of your traffic.

How to Find Your IP Address Locally

• Windows: run ipconfig in Command Prompt and read the IPv4 Address line.
• macOS: run ifconfig | grep inet, or ipconfig getifaddr en0 for the Wi-Fi interface.
• Linux: run ip addr show, the modern replacement for ifconfig.
• Public IP from a terminal: curl ifconfig.me or curl -s https://api.ipify.org.

The first three report your private, NAT-side address. Only the last one returns the public address shown above.

How Accurate Is IP Geolocation?

IP geolocation is an educated guess, not GPS. Providers build databases from regional registry records, ISP routing announcements, and network latency measurements, then map address ranges to places. Country-level accuracy is high; city-level accuracy is much shakier. The usual failure modes are mobile traffic that exits through a gateway in another city, corporate VPNs that place every employee at headquarters, and satellite or rural providers whose entire range resolves to one central point. If the map is a hundred miles off, the database is wrong — nothing is wrong with your connection.

This is also why IP location is not a substitute for the browser's geolocation permission, which uses GPS and nearby Wi-Fi networks and is accurate to meters. This page never asks for that permission.

VPNs, Proxies, and Tor

A VPN routes your traffic through its own server first, so sites — including this one — see the VPN's address and location rather than yours. An HTTP or SOCKS proxy does the same for whichever applications are configured to use it. Tor chains three relays and presents the exit node's address. All three change what this page reports, which makes reloading it the quickest way to confirm a tunnel is actually up. None of them hide your address from the VPN or proxy operator itself.

Frequently Asked Questions