How to Find Your IP Address on Any Device

When someone asks for your IP address, there are two possible answers, and giving the wrong one wastes everybody's afternoon. Your public IP is the address the rest of the internet sees — one address shared by every device in your home. Your private IP is the address your router hands out inside your own network, and it is different on your laptop, your phone and your printer.

A support agent troubleshooting your connection wants the public one. A guide about setting up a printer, forwarding a port or reaching a network drive wants the private one. This page covers both, on every platform.

The quickest route to the public one is the Internet Speed Test — it shows your public IP, city and serving edge node on page load, before you start a test.

Every home network has one public IP and as many private IPs as it has devices. Your router translates between them, which is why a hundred devices share one public address.

A shortcut for telling them apart: if the address starts with 192.168., 10., or anything from 172.16. to 172.31., it is private and reserved for internal use — those ranges are not routable on the public internet. Anything else is public. To see how such a range is carved up, the Subnet Calculator does the arithmetic.

Your public IP is the easy one, because any server you connect to can already see it and simply tell you.

1. In a browser — open the Internet Speed Test. The "Your connection" panel shows your public IP, your city and which edge server answered, on page load.
2. From a terminal — on macOS or Linux, ask a public resolver directly:

   dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

   This is worth knowing because it does not depend on any single website staying online.
3. From your router — the admin page usually lists the public address under WAN or Internet status. This is the authoritative source, since it is the address your ISP actually assigned.

All three should agree. If two disagree, you are probably behind a VPN in one and not the other.

The fastest route is the command line, but the Settings app works if you would rather not open a terminal.

1. Press Win + R, type cmd and press Enter.
2. Type ipconfig and press Enter.
3. Find the adapter you are actually using — "Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi" or "Ethernet adapter Ethernet" — and read IPv4 Address. That is your private IP.
4. Default Gateway, two lines below it, is your router's address.

Ignore adapters marked "Media disconnected" and virtual ones added by VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V or a VPN client. They have IPs too, and they are the most common reason someone reports a private IP nothing else on the network can reach.

Through the GUI instead: Settings → Network & internet, click your Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection, and read the IPv4 address near the bottom.

Nearly every guide on the internet tells you to run this:

ipconfig getifaddr en0

On a lot of Macs that command prints nothing at all — no error, just an empty line — because en0 is not always the interface you are using. On the machine this guide was written on, Wi-Fi is en1 and en0 is a wired port with no cable in it. Macs with a dock, a USB Ethernet adapter or a second network port often number interfaces this way.

Ask the system which interface actually carries your traffic instead of guessing:

ipconfig getifaddr $(route -n get default | awk '/interface:/{print $2}')

That returns the private IP of whichever interface holds the default route — 192.168.0.120 on the test machine — and it keeps working when you switch from Wi-Fi to Ethernet. To confirm which device is which, run networksetup -listallhardwareports.

If you prefer clicking: System Settings → Network, select your active connection, click Details, and the IP address is on the TCP/IP tab.

1. Open Settings and tap Wi-Fi.
2. Tap the ⓘ button beside the network you are connected to.
3. Read IP Address under the IPV4 ADDRESS heading. Router just below it is your gateway.

Two things surprise people. On cellular data there is no equivalent screen — your carrier assigns that address and does not expose it to the device, so check your public IP in a browser instead. And Private Wi-Fi Address, which you may see switched on, randomises your MAC address, not your IP — which is why a device can look brand new to your router after an iOS update.

Menu names vary by manufacturer; the path is consistent:

1. Settings → Network & internet → Internet (or "Wi-Fi" on older builds).
2. Tap the gear icon beside your connected network.
3. Expand Advanced or Network details and read the IP address.

Samsung devices put the same information under Settings → Connections → Wi-Fi, then the gear icon and View more. If the entry is missing entirely, the phone is on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi.

On any modern distribution, ip replaced the old ifconfig:

ip -4 addr show
ip route get 1.1.1.1

The first lists every interface with an IPv4 address. The second is more useful when several are active: it prints the exact source address and interface the kernel would use to reach the internet — almost always the one you want. ip route | grep default gives the router's address.

Your router's address — the "default gateway" — is what you type into a browser to reach its admin page. It is almost always the first usable address in your private range, but do not assume it.

Common defaults are 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 and 10.0.0.1, but ISP routers vary and mesh systems may hand you something else. Reading it takes five seconds; guessing wrong costs longer.

If the address you found is four numbers separated by dots, that is IPv4 — about 4.3 billion possible addresses, which the internet exhausted years ago. If it is a long string of hexadecimal separated by colons, such as 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334, that is IPv6, and the address space is large enough that it will not run out.

Most connections now run both at once, so it is normal to see an IPv4 and one or more IPv6 addresses on the same interface. Which one a given site sees depends on what that site supports. Two practical consequences:

• An allowlist built from your IPv4 address will not match you when your device chooses IPv6, and vice versa. If access breaks intermittently, this is the first thing to check.
• IPv6 is usually assigned per device rather than shared behind translation, so it identifies a single machine more precisely than a shared IPv4 does.

Not every connection has IPv6 yet. If an IPv6 lookup keeps returning an IPv4 address, your provider has not enabled it on your line.

These get confused constantly, and network setup guides are not always careful about which they mean.

A MAC address is six pairs of hexadecimal digits, like 1c:f6:4c:3c:72:40. It is burned into the network hardware, it identifies the adapter rather than the connection, and it never leaves your local network — routers do not forward it. An IP address is assigned by software, changes when you move between networks, and is how traffic finds you across the internet.

The practical test: if a setup screen asks for something with colons and letters, it wants the MAC. If it wants dots and numbers, it wants the IP. Router features like DHCP reservations and MAC filtering use the MAC; port forwarding and printer setup use the IP.

Most home connections get a dynamic public IP: the ISP leases you one and it may change after a reboot, an outage, or on the provider's schedule. Fine for browsing, terrible for anything that must be reached from outside — the address you shared last week may now belong to someone else.

A static IP never changes. ISPs generally charge business rates for one. Before paying, check whether you actually need it — dynamic DNS gives you a stable hostname that follows a changing IP, and it costs nothing.

Inside your own network the same choice exists and is free: a DHCP reservation in your router pins a specific private IP to a specific device. That is the correct fix for a printer or NAS that "disappears" every few weeks — the device has not broken, its private IP moved.

Worth being accurate about, because this topic attracts a lot of exaggeration in both directions.

What it does reveal: your rough geographic area — usually the city or region of your ISP's equipment, not your street — and who your internet provider is. That is enough for a streaming service to enforce licensing and for a site to guess your language.

What it does not reveal: your name, your address or your identity. The mapping from a public IP to a subscriber sits with your ISP and is released under legal process, not to whoever reads a log. IP geolocation is also routinely wrong by tens or hundreds of kilometres, which is why it can place you in a different city entirely.

If you want to change what sites see, a VPN substitutes its server's IP for yours — but understand the trade: you move the ability to see your traffic from your ISP to the VPN operator, which helps only if you trust them more. Free VPNs are funded somehow. And if the real concern is account security rather than location, a strong unique password on each account does far more good than hiding an IP.

Useful follow-ups:

• Internet Speed Test — your public IP, location and connection speed on one page.
• What Is a Good Internet Speed? — whether the line that address sits on is fast enough for your household.
• What Does Mbps Mean? — why a 100 Mbps connection downloads at 12.5 MB/s.
• Subnet Calculator — for when you are splitting a private range rather than just reading one address.