lan What Is My IP Address star

How It Works

This page shows the public IP address your device presents to the internet — the one websites and services actually see — along with your internet provider, approximate city-level location and time zone. IPv4 and IPv6 are detected separately, since many connections now have both running side by side. Below that, your browser details (user agent, screen resolution, language) are read locally from the browser itself, without any network lookup.

The IP and provider information comes from free lookup services (ipify and ipwho.is) queried directly from your browser — this site's server never sees or stores the result. What you are seeing is specifically your public IP: the address your internet provider (or your router's NAT) assigns to your entire connection as it faces the outside world. It is different from the private IP addresses (typically in the 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x ranges) that your router hands out to each device on your home or office network — a laptop, a phone and a smart TV can all share one public IP while each holding a different private one internally. Only the public IP is visible to the outside internet; private IPs never leave the local network.

The location shown is the registration area of your provider's network, which is why it can be a neighbouring city or even a different city than the one you are physically in; it is nowhere near street-level accuracy. Using a VPN? Then the address and location shown belong to the VPN server, not to you — this is precisely why checking this page is a fast way to confirm a VPN is actually tunnelling your traffic.

What You Should Know

A VPN hides your public IP from the sites you visit, but it does not automatically hide everything: some browsers can leak your real local network information through a feature called WebRTC, which browsers use for video calls and peer-to-peer connections. In certain configurations, WebRTC can reveal your actual local IP address even while a VPN is active and your public IP looks like the VPN server's — this is known as a WebRTC leak, and privacy-focused browsers or extensions can block it. If your public IP changes between visits without you using a VPN, that is normal: most home connections use a dynamic IP that your provider reassigns periodically, rather than a fixed address permanently tied to your account.

IPv4 addresses are a finite pool — roughly 4.3 billion — and that pool ran out years ago. Many providers now assign customers a shared address through Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), meaning several unrelated households can present the same public IPv4 address to the outside world at once, distinguished only by port numbers the provider tracks internally. IPv6, with its vastly larger address space, was designed to give every device its own globally unique address without this sharing, which is part of why this tool checks for both protocols rather than assuming IPv4 alone tells the full story. If you only ever see an IPv6 address and no IPv4 one, your provider likely runs an IPv6-only network with a translation layer for older IPv4-only sites.