English
العربية
Deutsch
Español
Français
Italiano
Português
Русский
Türkçe
Tiếng Việt
What Is My IP Address
See your public IP address and its approximate location.
The IP address this page shows you is not the same number your router uses to talk to your laptop. It is the address your entire home or office network presents to the rest of the internet — one public face for potentially dozens of private devices behind it.
Public versus private IP addresses
- Public IP — the address visible to the rest of the internet, assigned to you by your ISP; this is what the tool above shows.
- Private IP — an address like
192.168.1.15used only inside your own home or office network, invisible from outside it. - The router in between — translates between the two, a process called NAT, so many private devices can share one public address.
- Why this matters — a website you visit sees only your public IP, never the private address of the specific device you are using.
IPv4 and IPv6, and why both exist
IPv4 addresses, the familiar 203.0.113.44 style with four numbers, come from a pool of roughly 4.3 billion possible addresses. That sounds like a lot until you count every phone, laptop, server and smart device on earth — the pool ran out years ago, which is exactly why IPv6 exists. IPv6 addresses look like 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334 and offer such an enormous address space that exhaustion is not a practical concern again.
Most connections today use both simultaneously, a setup called dual-stack, and quietly prefer IPv6 when both the visitor and the site support it. That is why refreshing this page occasionally shows a different-looking address format even though nothing about your connection changed.
Why your IP address changes
Most home internet connections use what is called a dynamic IP — your ISP assigns one from a shared pool and can reassign a different one whenever your router reconnects, whether that is after a power cut, a router restart, or simply a periodic lease renewal happening in the background. Businesses and servers typically pay extra for a static IP that never changes, because services that need to be reliably reachable at the same address depend on it.
What a VPN actually changes
A VPN routes your traffic through its own server before it reaches the wider internet, so every site you visit sees the VPN server’s IP address instead of the one your ISP assigned you. Your own IP is not deleted or hidden from your ISP — they still see your traffic leaving toward the VPN — but everyone downstream of the VPN sees only its address and, by extension, its general location, not yours.
How accurate is the location shown?
Geolocation by IP address works by matching your address against a database that maps ranges to regions, and it is frequently accurate to the city, but not reliably to the neighbourhood, and occasionally wrong by hundreds of kilometres — particularly on mobile networks, satellite connections, or ISPs that register an entire regional block at one central office. Treat the location shown as a reasonable estimate, never as a precise or guaranteed result.
IP address questions
Why is my public IP different from the one shown on my router?
Your router likely shows its own private, internal address, something like 192.168.1.1, which only exists inside your home network. Your public IP, the one visible to the rest of the internet, is a different number assigned by your ISP.
Does my IP address change every time I restart my router?
On a dynamic IP setup, often yes, though not always — it depends on your ISP’s address pool and lease policy. A static IP, usually paid for separately, stays the same regardless of restarts.
Can someone find my home address from my IP?
Not directly. An IP lookup reveals your ISP and an approximate region, not a street address. Obtaining your actual address requires the ISP’s own customer records, which are only released under legal process.
Does a VPN make me completely anonymous online?
It hides your IP address from the sites you visit, which is meaningful, but it does not make you anonymous outright — cookies, browser fingerprinting, and logged-in accounts can all still identify you regardless of which IP address you are connecting from.
Why does my IP address show a location in a different city than I am actually in?
ISPs often register large address blocks at a central office rather than at each customer’s actual location, so the geolocation database’s best guess can be off by a meaningful distance, especially outside major cities.
