Public vs. private IP addresses
Most homes and offices have two kinds of IP address in play at once. The public IP — the one shown at the top of this page — is what your router presents to the wider internet, and it's shared by every device on your network. Private IPs (the familiar 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x addresses) are handed out by your router to each device behind it: your phone, your laptop, the smart TV.
Your router bridges the two using NAT (Network Address Translation), rewriting the "from" address on outgoing traffic so replies find their way back to the right device. That's why every device in your house appears to the outside world under a single public IP, and why a site can't tell your phone apart from your laptop by IP alone. This tool only ever sees the public address — it has no way to reach the private ones behind your router.
IPv4 vs. IPv6
IPv4 is the original format you'll recognise: four numbers from 0–255 separated by dots, like 203.0.113.42. It allows about 4.3 billion unique addresses — a number that sounded limitless in the 1980s and ran out years ago. To cope, providers lean heavily on NAT and address sharing, which is part of why so many people sit behind the same public IP.
IPv6 is the long-term fix: much longer addresses written in hexadecimal (like 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334), with enough room to give every device its own address many times over. Adoption is well underway, and many connections now run "dual-stack" — IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. This tool reports the IPv4 address your connection presents, which is still what the majority of sites log.
Dynamic vs. static IP addresses
Most home connections use a dynamic IP: your ISP leases you an address from a pool and can change it, typically when you reboot your router, when the lease expires, or during maintenance. That's normal and usually invisible — the address just quietly changes. It's also why the IP you see today may differ from the one you saw last week.
A static IP never changes and is usually something you pay extra for. Businesses want them for hosting servers, running mail, or whitelisting access to internal systems; most home users have no need for one. If you're not sure which you have, check the same IP over a few days — if it moves, it's dynamic. Note that some ISPs also use carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), where even your "public" IP is shared with other customers, which can complicate hosting anything from home.
How to find, change, or hide your IP
Finding it is the easy part — it's at the top of this page. Changing it depends on your setup: on a dynamic connection, rebooting your router (or leaving it off for a while) often pulls a new address; if you need a specific change, your ISP can usually help. Static addresses only change if your provider reassigns them.
Hiding your IP is a different goal, and the tools differ by trade-off. A VPN routes your traffic through a server and presents that server's IP to the sites you visit — fast and convenient, and the most common choice. Tor bounces your traffic through several volunteer relays for much stronger anonymity, at a real cost to speed. Public proxies exist too, but free ones are often slow, unreliable, and untrustworthy for anything sensitive. Whichever you use, the VPN checker on this site is a quick way to confirm the address you're now presenting isn't your home one.
Why your detected IP or location can look off
A few things routinely surprise people. If your location is wrong by a city or more, it's almost always the geolocation database being coarse or stale for your address block, not a fault in the lookup. If you're on mobile data, your IP often resolves to your carrier's regional hub rather than where you're standing. If you have a VPN running that you forgot about, the tool will faithfully show the VPN's IP and location. And on some ISPs, CGNAT means the public IP you see is shared, so it may not behave the way a dedicated address would.