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IPGet

Guide

How to find your IP address

The address the internet sees, the one your router handed you, and how to find each.

There are two answers, and they are both correct

Asking for “your IP address” is a bit like asking for your address without saying whether you mean the street or the room. Every device on a home or office network has at least two: a public address that identifies your connection to the rest of the internet, and a private address that identifies the device inside your own network. They are assigned by different parties, they look different, and they solve different problems.

The public address is the one this site reports on its home page, and the one almost everybody means. It is leased to your router by your internet provider, and every request leaving your network carries it. Websites see it, mail servers log it, and firewalls match on it.

The private address is handed out by your own router to each device that joins. It exists only inside your network. Its ranges are reserved precisely so that they can repeat everywhere without conflict — which is why so many home routers sit at 192.168.1.1 and why that address means nothing to anyone outside your house.

Side by side

Aspect Public address Private address
Who assigns it Your internet provider Your own router
Typical range Anything globally routable 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, 172.16–31.x.x
Unique on the internet Yes No — the same ranges repeat in every home
Visible to websites Yes No
Where to find it A lookup page like this one Your device’s network settings
Useful for Firewall rules, whitelists, support tickets Printers, NAS, local device access

Finding your public address

You cannot read it from your own device, and that surprises people. Your laptop genuinely does not know it: the address only comes into existence at your router’s outside interface, and nothing on the inside of the network is told what it is. The only way to learn it is to ask something on the outside what address your traffic arrived from.

That is precisely what a lookup page does. It reads the source address of your request and shows it back to you. There is no cleverness involved and no software to install — the address is already in every request you make, which is the whole reason it cannot be hidden without a tunnel of some kind.

Two details are worth knowing. First, you may have two public addresses: one IPv4 and one IPv6. Modern connections often carry both, and a site may report either depending on which one your browser chose for that request. Second, if you are behind carrier-grade NAT, the address reported is shared with other customers of your provider, and there is nothing you can configure to change that.

Finding your private address

This one lives on the device itself and is read from its network settings. It is the address you need when you want to reach a printer, a network drive, a media server or a router admin page from another machine in the same building.

Device Where to look
Windows Settings → Network & internet → your connection → IPv4 address
macOS System Settings → Network → your connection → Details → TCP/IP
iOS Settings → Wi-Fi → the (i) beside your network → IP Address
Android Settings → Network & internet → Wi-Fi → your network → Advanced
Linux ip addr show, or nmcli device show
Router The admin page, usually under Status or WAN

If the address you find begins 192.168, 10. or 172.16 through 172.31, it is private and confirms you are behind a router doing address translation. If it begins 100.64 through 100.127, you are behind carrier-grade NAT as well. If it is a globally routable address, your device is connected directly to the internet — common on a cloud server, unusual and worth checking on a home machine.

Link-local addresses mean something went wrong

An address starting 169.254 is not a real assignment. It is what a device gives itself when it asked for an address and nothing answered — a failed DHCP request. Seeing one means the device is not talking to your router properly, and no amount of application-level troubleshooting will help until that is fixed.

Which one does the question actually need?

When someone asks for “your IP”, the public one is nearly always the answer. Whitelisting for a work VPN, a game server or a database; giving a support engineer something to correlate against their logs; checking whether a block applies to you — all of these operate on the address the internet sees.

The private address is the answer when the thing you are connecting to is in the same building. Reaching a NAS, printing to a network printer, opening a router’s admin interface, or connecting two machines on the same Wi-Fi all use the private address, and using the public one would send the traffic out to the internet and straight back to your own front door — where your router will usually refuse it.

Why the same public address applies to your whole household

Network address translation is the reason. Your router keeps a table mapping each internal conversation to a port on the single public address, rewrites packets on the way out, and reverses the process on the way back. It works so well that most people never notice it — until a site rate-limits “their” address and everyone in the house is affected at once, or until they try to run a server and discover that inbound connections have nowhere to go without an explicit port forward.

A note on privacy

Your public address is not a secret in any meaningful sense — you hand it to every server you contact, because there is no other way for a reply to reach you. What it reveals is your internet provider and an approximate region, typically the city or the metropolitan area of the equipment your connection terminates on. It does not reveal a street address, and geolocation databases are frequently off by a considerable distance, particularly on mobile networks.

If you want the address the internet sees to be something other than your own, that requires a tunnel: a VPN, a proxy or Tor. Each changes what a website sees while leaving what your browser reveals about itself entirely untouched.

Frequently asked questions

Which IP address do people usually mean?

Almost always the public one — the address the rest of the internet sees when your traffic arrives. That is the address a game server needs for a whitelist, a support engineer asks for when diagnosing a block, and a firewall rule matches on. The private address your router assigned, usually something starting 192.168 or 10., is only meaningful inside your own network and is the wrong answer to nearly every question that begins "what is my IP".

Why does my address change on its own?

Most residential connections use dynamic addressing: the provider leases you an address for a period and may hand you a different one when the lease renews, when your router reboots, or when their equipment is reconfigured. Mobile data changes even more often, frequently on every reconnection. A static address that never changes is normally a paid extra on a business plan.

Everyone in my house sees the same public IP. Is that normal?

Yes, and it is how nearly every home network works. Your router performs network address translation: every device gets its own private address inside the house, and all of them share the single public address on the outside. From the internet, your laptop and your phone are indistinguishable — which is why blocks and rate limits usually affect the whole household at once.

What is a CGNAT address and how do I know if I have one?

Carrier-grade NAT is the same trick applied one level higher: your provider puts many customers behind one public address. The giveaway is that the address shown on your router does not match the address a lookup site reports, and the router address falls in 100.64.0.0/10. On CGNAT you cannot forward ports or host anything reachable from outside, no matter what you configure locally.

Can I find someone else’s address this way?

No. A tool like this reports the address of whoever is using it. There is no lookup that turns a name, an email address or a social media account into an IP address, and any service claiming otherwise is either guessing or selling something that does not work. Going the other way — taking an address you already have and finding out which network operates it — is possible and is what an IP lookup does.

Does a VPN change what this page reports?

Yes, and that is the point of one. With a VPN active the address reported is the VPN exit server’s, in whichever country you selected. Your real address is known to the VPN provider and to nobody else. If a lookup still shows your own provider’s address while the VPN client says it is connected, the tunnel is not carrying your browser traffic — which is exactly the failure worth catching.

Try it yourself

Everything above is easier to follow against a real answer.