What Is My IP Address

Shows your public IP, ISP, approximate location and connection details — the address the rest of the internet actually sees when you connect to something, as opposed to the private address your router hands out on the LAN.

Public vs private, since the two get conflated

Your private IP — usually something in the 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x range — only exists inside your local network and is invisible to anything outside it. Your public IP, the one this tool shows, is what your ISP assigns to your connection and what every external server actually sees. If someone asks for "your IP address" in a networking context, they almost always mean this one, not the private address your laptop shows in its network settings.

IPv4 and IPv6, side by side

Most connections are still IPv4 — four dotted decimal numbers, like 203.0.113.42. IPv6 is the 128-bit successor, written in hex groups (2001:db8::1), and a lot of modern ISPs now hand out both simultaneously in a dual-stack setup. If your connection supports it, this tool shows both.

Why the location shown is sometimes just wrong

Geolocation is approximate by nature — ISPs frequently register address blocks to a head office or regional data centre rather than wherever the connection is physically being used, so the location you see can be a city or even a country off from where you actually are. If you're on a VPN, what you're seeing is the VPN server's location, not yours, which is usually exactly the point.

Practical reasons people actually look this up

• Getting the exact address needed for a firewall allowlist or IP-restricted admin panel
• Setting up remote access that requires a known public IP on the other end
• Confirming a VPN is actually masking your real address, not just claiming to
• Checking which IP your outbound mail server is using, before configuring an SPF record around it

And on the dynamic-vs-static question: most residential connections get a dynamic IP that can change on a router restart, business connections typically get a static one that doesn't, and mobile connections can shift constantly as you move between towers. If you need a permanent address for hosting or remote access, that's a specific request to your ISP, not something you can assume you already have.