How to find your IP address – and what it reveals about you

An IP address is the number under which a device can be reached on a network – much like a postal address. At home there are two levels of this. The public IP address is assigned to your router by your internet provider as soon as it establishes the connection. It is unique worldwide, and it is how your entire household appears on the internet: every website, every mail server, every game server sees this one address, no matter which device you happen to be using.

The local or private IP address is handed out by the router itself to every device on your home network, usually automatically via DHCP. These addresses come from reserved ranges that are not routed on the internet: 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 and 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255. That is why a device in millions of households can have the address 192.168.1.20 at the same time without any conflict – the addresses are only valid within their own network.

What makes this work is network address translation (NAT) in the router: it remembers which device opened which connection, swaps the local address for the public one on the way out and hands the replies back to the right device. For you this means: if you want to reach a printer, forward a port or find a device on your home network, you need the local address. If you want to know what the internet sees of you, or to access your network from outside, the public one is what counts.

IPv4 is the older protocol: addresses such as 203.0.113.45 consist of four numbers between 0 and 255, i.e. 32 bits. That gives a good four billion addresses – not enough for every device in the world. The supply is practically exhausted, which is why providers resort to tricks such as NAT and sometimes use one public IPv4 address for several customers at once (carrier-grade NAT, DS-Lite).

IPv6 solves the problem with 128-bit addresses, written as eight blocks of hexadecimal digits separated by colons, such as 2001:db8::1. That provides around 3.4 × 10³⁸ addresses, and according to FRITZ! the provider does not assign a single IPv6 address but an entire subnet: every device on your home network can get its own globally valid IPv6 address, and NAT is no longer needed. Because the transition is happening gradually, most connections today use both in parallel («dual stack») – which is why settings pages and IP websites often show you two addresses.

Regardless of the version, the public address on home connections is usually dynamic: the provider assigns it to you from its pool and may change it when a new connection is established or after a certain time. Some providers keep the address for weeks, others change it regularly. A fixed («static») public address is generally an add-on product or reserved for business connections; anyone who wants to reach a device at home from outside permanently usually uses a dynamic DNS service instead, which many routers have built in.

Your public IP address is visible with every page you load, because without it the reply could not find its way back to you. Websites, advertising networks, mail servers (the address often sits in the header of every message you send), messaging servers and online games can therefore all see it. From it, one can tell which internet provider the address belongs to and in which country and roughly which region it is being used – IP addresses, as Google puts it in its help pages, follow geography only loosely.

Google describes just how imprecise this location is in its help page on location when searching: from the IP address, Google only estimates a «general area» that is larger than three square kilometres, covers at least 1,000 users and is usually considerably larger outside cities. In practice the location often lands in the wrong city, because providers manage their addresses centrally. Your name, street or house number are not revealed by your IP address; only your internet provider knows that link, and it hands it over only on an official or court order.

Someone knowing your IP address is not a security problem in itself – it is technically necessary and changes on most connections anyway. A risk only arises if someone deliberately attacks devices that are reachable from outside, for example through a carelessly set up port forward, or if they combine the address with data from other sources. Your router blocks incoming connections by default; keeping your router firmware and devices up to date therefore matters more than keeping your IP address secret.

The simplest way to get a new public IPv4 address, if yours is dynamic, is to restart your router: unplug it briefly or choose «Reconnect» in its menu. The provider will often assign a different address afterwards – but not always; some providers keep the address stable for days or weeks. If you switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data, you are automatically using a different address, namely one belonging to your mobile network operator.

If you want to hide your address from websites permanently, you need a VPN. It routes your traffic through a server run by the VPN provider, so websites see only that server's address, in a country of your choosing. To be honest, this merely shifts the visibility: the VPN provider knows your real address and sees which servers you connect to. That is why choosing a trustworthy provider is crucial; whether a VPN makes sense for you at all is covered in our guide (→ Do you really need a VPN in 2026? The honest guide), and we have looked at specific providers in (→ Surfshark review 2026: cheap, but is it good?) and (→ NordVPN review 2026: is the market leader still worth it?).

There is also Apple's iCloud Private Relay (Safari only, iCloud+ only), which according to Apple hides your IP address from network operators and websites, and the Tor Browser, which routes connections through several relays and is therefore noticeably slower. In every case, bear in mind: a different IP address does not make you anonymous as long as you are signed in to the same accounts or cookies recognise you – more on that in (→ Clear cache and cookies – in every browser, on your computer and your phone). The local IP address of your device, on the other hand, can be fixed at any time in the router or in the network settings; it plays no role on the internet.

If Windows reports an «IP address conflict» or a device keeps dropping off the Wi-Fi, two devices on your home network have the same local address. This usually happens when a device has been given a fixed address by hand that the router later also hands out to another device via DHCP, or when two routers on the same network are distributing addresses.

The quick fix: restart the router and the affected device so that both obtain a fresh address via DHCP. On Windows you can also do this without a restart using the commands «ipconfig /release» and «ipconfig /renew» in Command Prompt; on a Mac via «System Settings» > «Wi-Fi» > «Details» > «TCP/IP» > «Renew DHCP Lease». To avoid the conflict for good, reserve fixed addresses in the router rather than on the device – on a FRITZ!Box under «Home Network» > «Network», with the option to always assign the device the same IPv4 address.