How Do I Check My Own IP Address?

Open an IP lookup and read the address it shows. That is the public address your connection presents to every website you visit, and the lookup adds the ISP, organisation and approximate location that go with it. If you use this site's lookup with the Use my IP action, you will also see whether an IPv4 address, an IPv6 address or both are in use.

Your devices and your router talk to each other with private addresses from ranges reserved for that purpose, most commonly 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x and 172.16 to 172.31. These are defined in RFC 1918 and never appear on the internet. Your router translates between them and the single public IPv4 address your ISP assigned to the connection, which is why every device on your Wi-Fi shows the same public IPv4 address.

The address printed by your operating system is almost always the private one. On Windows, ipconfig shows it; on macOS and Linux, ifconfig or ip addr do. The public address lives on the router's WAN interface, visible in the router's admin page, or through any service that echoes the address it received.

If you prefer a terminal, request a service that returns the address it saw. For example, fetching https://api64.ipify.org returns your IPv6 address when you have one and your IPv4 address otherwise, and https://api.ipify.org returns the IPv4 address only. Comparing the two tells you whether your connection is dual-stack.

Most home connections get a dynamic address that the ISP can renew or reassign, so the public IPv4 address changes occasionally without any action from you. Switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data moves you to a carrier network with a different address. A VPN replaces the address with its exit server's. On IPv6, privacy extensions rotate the device's temporary address on a schedule, so the IPv6 result can differ from day to day even when nothing else changed.

If your ISP provides IPv6, your connection has two public identities. Websites that support IPv6 will see the IPv6 address; the rest see IPv4. Both are legitimate, both are yours, and a lookup on each may show slightly different location data because they come from different address blocks. The IPv6 address is generally specific to one device, whereas the IPv4 address is shared by the whole household behind the router.

Use it to confirm a VPN is active before doing something sensitive, to check whether an access rule or allowlist contains the right address, to see whether your address carries a reputation problem when a site blocks you, and to understand why a service thinks you are in another city.

The same lookup tells you whether a proxy is leaking your real address (the result should show the proxy's address and location, not your ISP's) and whether your ISP has quietly reassigned your connection since you last looked, which matters when an allowlist somewhere still holds the old value. It is worth making the check a habit after any change to your network: a new router, a new VPN client, a change of ISP, or IPv6 being switched on. It takes a few seconds, needs nothing beyond a browser or a terminal, and catches the surprise before a blocked login or a failed allowlist does.