How to Find Your IP Address, Public and Local

You have at least two IP addresses, they look different, and almost every set of instructions that mentions “your IP address” fails to say which one it means.

The short version: the local address identifies your device inside your home. The public address identifies your whole household to the internet. Troubleshooting instructions about printers, port forwarding and network settings want the local one. Instructions about remote access, allowlists and geoblocking want the public one.

The two addresses

Every device in your home has its own local address, handed out by the router’s DHCP server. Those addresses live in ranges reserved as private and not routable on the internet: 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, and 172.16.x.x through 172.31.x.x. Millions of homes use 192.168.1.10 simultaneously without conflict, because the address means nothing outside the building.

Your provider gives the router a single public address. When your laptop talks to a website, the router rewrites the outgoing packets to carry the public address, remembers which internal device the conversation belongs to, and reverses the substitution on the way back. That process is NAT, and it is why a website sees one address for your entire household.

Find your public IP

Open a browser and search for what is my IP. The result appears directly in the search results on most engines, and there is no reason to click into any of the sites below it.

If you prefer a direct source, ifconfig.me and icanhazip.com return the bare address and nothing else.

Three things to know about the result:

• Everyone in the house shares it. A phone on the same Wi-Fi shows the same number.
• It changes. Most residential connections are dynamic, and the address can be reassigned when the router reconnects. A static address is normally a paid extra on a business plan.
• A VPN replaces it. With a VPN connected you see the VPN server’s address, which is the entire point of one.

You may also see an IPv6 address, a long string of hexadecimal separated by colons. Many connections now have both, and in IPv6 each device typically has its own globally routable address rather than hiding behind NAT.

Find your local IP

Windows — Terminal or Command Prompt:

ipconfig

Read IPv4 Address under your active adapter. The Default Gateway on the line below is your router, which is the address you need when logging into the router’s admin page.

The graphical route: Settings → Network & internet → Wi-Fi or Ethernet → Hardware properties.

macOS — System Settings → Network → your active connection → Details → TCP/IP. (Ventura and later; earlier versions used System Preferences → Network → Advanced.)

Or in Terminal:

ipconfig getifaddr en0

iPhone and iPad — Settings → Wi-Fi → the blue i beside your network. The IP Address field under IPV4 ADDRESS is the local one; Router below it is the gateway.

Android — Settings → Network & internet → Internet → the gear beside your network → expand Network details or Advanced. On Samsung, Connections → Wi-Fi → the gear → View more.

Linux — ip addr or hostname -I.

Which one does your task need?

A rule of thumb that holds up: if the thing you are configuring is inside your house, it wants the local address. If it is somewhere on the internet, it wants the public one.

Reading the local address

The numbers tell you something useful.

• Starts 192.168., 10. or 172.16–172.31 — normal private address. All is well.
• Starts 169.254. — the device failed to get an address from the router and assigned itself a link-local one. The connection will not work. Usually DHCP is unreachable or the router’s address pool is exhausted. Renew the lease (ipconfig /release then ipconfig /renew on Windows) or restart the router.
• Starts 100.64.–100.127. — carrier-grade NAT. Your provider has put you behind a shared public address, which breaks port forwarding and most remote access. Only your provider can change it, usually by issuing a real public address on request.
• 127.0.0.1 — loopback, the device talking to itself. Not useful for anything external.

That third one catches people out when remote access refuses to work no matter how carefully the port forwarding is configured. If your router’s WAN address starts 100.64 and the public IP from a website is different, you are behind carrier-grade NAT and no amount of configuration will fix it.

Privacy, briefly and honestly

A public IP identifies a connection, not a person. Geolocation from it typically resolves to a city or region, and frequently points at a provider facility some distance from where you actually are.

What it does expose: your provider, your rough area, and a consistent identifier that sites can use alongside other signals. Your provider can link it to your account, and discloses that only under legal process.

A VPN substitutes the address, which is genuine but partial privacy — the VPN operator sees what your provider used to. Changing your public IP yourself is usually a matter of restarting the router long enough for the lease to expire, and on many connections it comes back identical anyway.

Pinning a device to a fixed address

Printers, NAS boxes and anything you connect to by address are better off not moving. There are two ways to arrange that, and only one of them is a good idea.

A DHCP reservation, set on the router, tells it to always hand the same address to a particular device. The device still asks for an address normally, so it also receives the correct gateway and DNS, and nothing conflicts. Look for a reservation, static lease or address binding option in the router’s DHCP section.

A static IP set on the device itself bypasses the router’s bookkeeping entirely. The router does not know the address is taken and may hand it to something else, which produces intermittent failures on both devices that are genuinely unpleasant to diagnose. If you must do it, pick an address outside the router’s DHCP range — if the pool is 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.200, use something below 100.

Reservations are the right answer in nearly every home. They survive device reboots, they cannot conflict, and they are all in one place when you need to change something.

When the address is the problem

Two devices with the same local address produces intermittent failures that look like a hardware fault. It happens when someone assigns a static IP inside the router’s DHCP range and the router later hands the same address to something else.

If a device connects to Wi-Fi but gets no internet while others are fine, check its address first. A 169.254 address or a duplicate explains the symptom immediately, and the triage in Wi-Fi connected but no internet covers what to do about it.