What Is My IP? Find Your Computer's IP in Windows 11 & 10

Press Windows + R, type cmd, press Enter, then type ipconfig and press Enter. The line marked IPv4 Address is your computer's IP address.

But that number is almost certainly not the one you were asked for — because your computer has two IP addresses, and Windows only shows you one of them.

The address ipconfig reports starts with 192.168 on most home networks. It identifies your PC inside your own house. Meanwhile every website you visit sees a completely different number, which identifies your household to the rest of the internet.

Both are real. Both get called "your IP address" by people who mean different things by it. And neither one is actually yours — both are lent to you, one by your router and one by your internet provider, and both can be taken back and reissued without warning.

Which one you need depends entirely on what asked for it, and that is the part nobody explains.

The Address That Was Right and Still Did Not Work

A customer brought a laptop into Jake's shop because a security camera he had bought would not connect from outside the house. The instructions told him to enter his IP address into the phone app. He had done exactly that. He had looked it up properly, written it down carefully, and typed it in twice to be sure.

The number he had entered was 192.168.1.34.

It was a completely correct answer to the question "what is my IP address." Windows had told him so. It was also useless for what he was doing, because that number only means something inside his own house — and the phone he was testing with was on mobile data, three miles away.

He had not made a mistake. He asked a reasonable question, received a true answer, and was given no indication anywhere that a second answer existed and that it was the one he needed.

Ethan's take when Jake described it: "That's a naming problem, not a user problem. Two different things are both called your IP address, Windows shows you one of them without ever mentioning the other exists, and the camera instructions said 'your IP address' as though there were only one. Three separate things all assumed he already knew the distinction they were built on."

Once you can see the two addresses as separate objects, most of the confusion around this subject disappears in about a minute — including several problems that look like faults and are not.

Two Addresses, Two Different Jobs

The clearest way to hold this is by comparison with ordinary post. Your street address gets a letter to your building. Once it arrives, something inside the building decides which flat it belongs to. Neither piece of information is the whole address, and neither is any use without the other.

Your public IP address is the street address. There is exactly one for your whole home, it is issued by your internet provider, and it is what every website and online service sees when anything in your house talks to it. Your phone, your TV and your laptop all appear to the outside world as that single number.

Your local IP address is the flat number. Your router hands one to every device on your network so it can tell them apart, and those numbers are meaningless anywhere else. This is the one ipconfig shows you.

The router sits between the two and does the translation, keeping a running list of which internal device requested what so the replies come back to the right machine. That process has a name — network address translation — and it is running on essentially every home connection on earth.

So when something asks for "your IP address," the real question is who is asking. Something inside your house needs the flat number. Something outside it needs the street address.

Finding the Local Address, and Reading What Comes Back

The command route is the fastest and it behaves the same on Windows 11 and Windows 10.

1. Press Windows + R, type cmd and press Enter. No administrator rights are needed for this — if you want them for something else, our guide on running Command Prompt as administrator covers it.
2. Type ipconfig and press Enter.
3. Ignore everything with Media disconnected beside it. Those are adapters that are not in use.
4. Find the adapter you are actually connected through — Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi for wireless, Ethernet adapter for a cable.
5. Read the line marked IPv4 Address. That number is your local address.

If you would rather not use a command, the same number lives in Settings → Network & internet, in the properties of your active connection. It is slower to reach and it shows the same thing.

The output includes several other lines, and knowing what they are turns ipconfig from a lookup into a diagnostic tool:

Line	What it is	When it matters
IPv4 Address	Your local address on this network	This is the one you were looking for
Default Gateway	Your router's own address	Type it into a browser to reach the router's settings page
Subnet Mask	Which part of the number identifies the network	Rarely, unless you are setting an address by hand
IPv6 Address	The long hexadecimal address for the same adapter	When something specifically asks for IPv6
Physical Address	The MAC address of the hardware, not an IP at all	Router filtering and reservations — a separate thing entirely
Media disconnected	An adapter with no connection	Skip these; they are why the output looks so long

Finding the Public Address, Which Windows Will Not Tell You

There is no command that reads your public address off your own machine, and the reason is worth understanding rather than working around: your computer genuinely does not know it.

Your PC only knows the address its router gave it. The public address belongs to the router, not to the PC, and the only way to learn it is to ask something on the outside what address your traffic appeared to arrive from.

Two ways to do that. From Command Prompt, current builds of Windows include curl, so this works directly:

curl ifconfig.me

Or open your router's settings page — the Default Gateway address from the table above, typed into a browser — and look for the WAN or Internet section. The address shown there is the one your provider issued.

That second method is worth knowing for a reason beyond convenience, and it is the basis of the port forwarding check further down: the router's WAN address and the address a website reports should be the same number. When they are not, that difference tells you something specific about your connection.

When Your Address Starts With 169.254

This one deserves its own section because it is the single most useful thing ipconfig can report, and almost nobody knows what it means.

If your IPv4 address begins 169.254, your computer did not receive an address at all. It asked the network, waited, got no answer, and assigned itself something from a reserved range so that it would at least have a number. Windows sometimes labels it Autoconfiguration IPv4 Address, which is the only clue on offer.

It means the conversation with your router failed. That narrows the problem enormously, because it rules out almost everything people normally start with:

• Not a website problem, not a browser problem, not a DNS problem. You never got far enough for any of those to be involved.
• Usually the physical link or the router. A cable seated badly, a switch that has stopped passing traffic, a router that needs restarting, or the wrong wireless network joined.
• Occasionally the address pool is exhausted — a router configured to hand out a small range on a network with a lot of devices simply runs out.

Try ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew in an administrator Command Prompt. If the address comes back as 169.254 again, the machine is not the problem and there is no point continuing to work on it.

Why the Number Is Different Today

People write the number down, come back a week later, find a different one, and reasonably conclude something has gone wrong. Nothing has. Addresses are leased, not owned, and the lease is the whole design.

Your router lends each device a local address for a set period. When that period ends the device asks to keep it, and usually does — but if the machine was switched off for long enough, the address may have been given to something else in the meantime, and a different one comes back.

The same applies on the outside. Most home connections get a dynamic public address, which can change when the router restarts, when the provider does maintenance, or on no visible schedule at all. A fixed public address is normally something you pay extra for on a business plan.

This matters in exactly one situation: you wrote an address into a setting somewhere. A printer configured by address, a camera, a port forwarding rule, a network drive mapped by number. Those all break silently when the number moves, and the failure looks nothing like an address problem — it looks like the device has died.

That is the case the fixed-address section below exists to solve, and it is worth solving properly rather than by rewriting the number every few weeks.

The Public Address You Share With Strangers

Here is the part that surprises people who already understood everything above.

The supply of IPv4 addresses ran out years ago. Providers responded by doing to their customers what your router already does to your devices: putting many households behind a single public address and translating between them. It is generally called carrier-grade translation, and on mobile connections it is close to universal.

Which means the address a website sees may not identify your household either. It may be shared, right now, with a few hundred other customers of the same provider.

Two consequences that look like unrelated faults:

• Port forwarding cannot work. You can configure the rule on your router perfectly and nothing will reach it, because the port you are forwarding does not belong solely to you. This is the real explanation behind an enormous number of failed camera, game server and remote desktop setups.
• You inherit other people's reputation. A site telling you that your address is blocked, or asking you to prove you are not a machine over and over, may be reacting to something a stranger sharing your address did.

Ethan's view on this one: "That's the one I'd want people to check first, because it's the only problem here you cannot fix from your own side. Somebody can spend a whole weekend on router settings, firewall rules and port checkers, and every one of those steps is reasonable, and none of them can work. Ten seconds of comparing two numbers would have told them to phone their provider instead."

The check takes a minute: compare the WAN address on your router's status page with the address curl ifconfig.me reports. If those two numbers differ, you are behind carrier-grade translation — and no amount of router configuration will change it. The fix is to ask your provider for a genuine public address, which some offer free on request and others charge for.

The Long Address Underneath

Alongside the familiar four numbers, ipconfig shows something much longer made of hexadecimal groups separated by colons. That is IPv6, and most connections now run both at the same time.

IPv6 exists because IPv4 offers roughly four billion addresses, which sounded generous when the format was designed and stopped being enough some time ago. IPv6 provides a supply large enough that running out is not a practical concern.

For everyday purposes you can ignore it. It matters in two situations. First, when something specifically asks for an IPv6 address, in which case take it from the line labeled as such. Second, when a connection behaves strangely in a way that comes and goes — a site that loads on one device and not another, or a VPN that connects but carries no traffic. Those can be IPv6 taking a different route than expected, and temporarily turning IPv6 off in the adapter's properties is a legitimate way to find out.

Our guide to a VPN that connects but reports no internet covers that pattern in detail, because it is one of the more common versions of it.

What Your Address Actually Reveals

Search this topic and you will find pages designed to alarm you, usually a few paragraphs before recommending a product. The reality is narrower and more specific than either the scare version or the dismissive version.

What a public IP address does reveal	What it does not
Which internet provider you use	Your name or your account details
A rough region, often the wrong one	Your street, house or exact position
That several visits came from one household	Which person or device in it
Whether the connection is home, business or mobile	Anything about what is on your computer
Enough for a provider to identify an account, with legal authority	Enough for a website to do the same

The location point is worth dwelling on because it is so consistently overstated. Address-to-location databases map ranges to wherever the provider registered them, which can be a different city or a different region entirely. Plenty of people have been shown a map of somewhere they have never lived and concluded the internet knows where they sleep.

The genuine privacy point is smaller and more real: your address is visible to every site you visit and is one of the signals used to recognize returning visitors. That is worth knowing. It is not worth being frightened by, and a page that skips from "visible" to "you are exposed" is usually selling something. Our wider guide on protecting your privacy in Windows puts it in proportion against the settings that matter more.

Making an Address Stay Put

If you have written a local address into a printer, a camera, a shared folder or a forwarding rule, you want that number to stop moving. There are two ways, and the popular one is the worse one.

The approach most guides give you is to set the address by hand in Windows, under Settings → Network & internet, in the adapter's IP assignment options. It works. It also creates a device the router does not know is special, and if the router later hands the same number to a laptop that just joined, both machines break at once with an address conflict.

The approach that avoids that is a reservation on the router:

1. Run ipconfig /all and note the Physical Address for the adapter — that is the MAC address, and it does not change.
2. Open your router's settings page using the Default Gateway address.
3. Find the section named DHCP reservation, address reservation, or static lease — the wording varies by manufacturer.
4. Pair the MAC address with the address you want that device to keep.
5. Restart the device. It now asks for an address as normal and is always given the same one.

The difference is that the router remains in charge of the whole range and cannot issue a duplicate. Windows keeps its normal automatic setting, and there is no configuration on the PC that a reinstall or a network reset will quietly discard.

What This Page Said Before, and What It Covers Now

The version of this page published in December 2016 gave the ipconfig steps and stopped there. Everything in it was accurate. It simply answered the narrow question and left the reader holding a number without saying which of the two possible numbers it was, or when it would be the wrong one.

That gap is the reason the customer in Jake's shop typed a correct address into a camera app and got nowhere, and it is the reason this rewrite exists.

New here: the distinction between the local and public addresses and how to find each, what 169.254 means and why it ends a troubleshooting session early, why the number changes, the carrier-grade translation check that explains most failed port forwarding, a table for reading the whole of the ipconfig output, and an honest account of what an address does and does not give away.

Your Questions, Answered Straight

What is my IP address?

You have two, and they answer different questions. The local address identifies your computer on your own network and is the one Windows shows you, usually beginning 192.168. The public address identifies your whole household to the rest of the internet and is the one websites see. Neither belongs to you permanently. Both are lent.

How do I find my IP address in Windows 11 and 10?

Press Windows and R together, type cmd, press Enter, then type ipconfig and press Enter again. Find your active adapter and read the line marked IPv4 Address. That is your local address. It works identically on Windows 11 and Windows 10, and it needs no administrator rights.

Why does my IP address start with 192.168?

Because it is a private address, handed to you by your own router rather than by your internet provider. That range is reserved for use inside private networks, which is why millions of homes are using an identical number at this moment without any conflict. Private addresses only have meaning inside the network that issued them.

Why is the address in Windows different from the one a website shows me?

Because your router translates between them. Everything in your home shares one public address, and the router keeps track of which internal device asked for what. Windows reports the inside number and the website reports the outside one. Both are correct, and nothing has gone wrong.

What does an address starting with 169.254 mean?

It means your computer asked the network for an address and nothing answered, so it invented one for itself. That range is the sign that the conversation with your router failed. It is one of the most useful things ipconfig can tell you, because it points at the link to the router rather than at anything on the machine.

Why does my IP address keep changing?

Because addresses are leased rather than owned. Your router lends a local address for a fixed period and may issue a different one afterwards, and most providers do the same with your public address. Nothing is broken when the number changes. It is the normal behavior of a system designed to reuse a limited supply.

Can two computers have the same IP address?

On separate private networks, constantly and harmlessly. On the same network it is a genuine fault, and Windows will usually say so with an address conflict warning. It normally happens when a device was given a fixed address inside the range the router is still handing out automatically.

What is 127.0.0.1?

It is the loopback address, and it always means this machine, on every computer ever made. It never leaves your PC and it is no use for reaching you from anywhere else. If a guide asks you to open 127.0.0.1 in a browser, it is asking you to talk to something running on your own computer.

How do I find my public IP address without visiting a website?

You can ask from Command Prompt with curl ifconfig.me, which is built into current Windows. The honest answer, though, is that every method needs a working internet connection, because your public address is only knowable by asking something outside your home. Your router's status page will also show it.

Does my IP address reveal my home address?

No. It usually resolves to your provider and to a city or region, and that region is often wrong by a considerable distance because it reflects where the provider registered the range rather than where you are sitting. Your provider can connect an address to an account. A website cannot.

Why does port forwarding not work on my connection?

Often because your public address is shared with other customers through carrier-grade translation, so there is no port on it that belongs only to you. A quick check is to compare the address on your router's status page with the one a website reports. If those two differ, you are behind that kind of sharing.

Should I hide my IP address with a VPN?

It depends what you are protecting. A VPN replaces the address sites see with the provider's, which helps on untrusted networks and against basic location blocking. It does not make you anonymous, and it moves your trust from your internet provider to the VPN company rather than removing the need to trust anyone.

What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?

IPv4 is the familiar four-number format, and the supply of them ran short years ago. IPv6 is the long hexadecimal address underneath it, and there are effectively unlimited numbers of those. Most connections now run both at once, which is why ipconfig shows two addresses for the same adapter.

How do I set a fixed IP address in Windows?

You can set one in Settings under Network & internet, in the adapter's IP assignment options. The safer route for most people is a reservation on the router instead, which tells the router to always hand the same address to that device and avoids the conflicts that manually set addresses tend to cause.

Is my MAC address the same as my IP address?

No. The MAC address is burned into the network hardware and identifies the adapter itself, while the IP address is assigned by the network and changes along with it. Both appear in the same ipconfig output, which is why the two are so often mistaken for one another.

Does this apply to Windows 11 as well as Windows 10?

Yes. The ipconfig command, the address ranges and the way a router hands out addresses are identical on both. Windows 11 arranges the network pages in Settings differently, and that is the only difference worth mentioning here.

Worth Reading Next

Revision note. Originally published December 19, 2016 as a short walkthrough of the ipconfig command. Rewritten August 22, 2026 for Windows 11 and Windows 10. The original was correct as far as it went, and that turned out to be the problem — it handed readers a number without mentioning that a second, different number exists and is the one most people are being asked for. New here: the local and public addresses set side by side, what 169.254 tells you and why it saves an evening, why the number changes, the carrier-grade translation check behind most failed port forwarding, a full reading of the ipconfig output, and a measured account of what an address reveals. If you came here because something asked for your IP address and you are still not certain which one it wants, write in and say what asked — that single detail settles it almost every time, and if the question is coming up often it belongs in the page rather than in our inbox. And if you already typed the 192.168 number into something and it did not work: that was the design leading you there, not you missing something obvious.