What Is My IP Address?

An IP address is the return address of everything you do online. Every website you open, every app that phones home, and every ad network embedded in a page receives it automatically — there is no opt-out, because without it the response traffic couldn't find its way back to you.

On its own, an IP address won't hand a stranger your name or street address. But it does reveal more than most people expect: your approximate location (usually accurate to the city), your internet service provider, your connection type (home broadband, mobile, business line), and a stable identifier that lets sites and trackers recognize you across visits. Combine that with browser fingerprinting and account logins, and your IP becomes one thread in a very detailed profile. It's also the primary signal streaming platforms, online stores, and betting sites use to decide what content and prices to show you — and the identifier that appears in server logs when anyone investigates online activity.

That's why "what is my IP" is the first check in every VPN test we run: whatever address appears in the panel above is exactly what the rest of the internet sees.

The panel labels your address IPv4 or IPv6. IPv4 is the classic format — four numbers separated by dots, like 203.0.113.42. It supports about 4.3 billion addresses, which ran out years ago, so ISPs increasingly share one IPv4 address across many customers (a setup called CGNAT). IPv6 is the replacement — eight groups of hexadecimal characters separated by colons — with enough addresses to give every grain of sand on Earth trillions of its own.

The privacy nuance matters: because IPv6 addresses are so plentiful, your devices often get unique ones — better for engineers, worse for anonymity. Many VPNs simply disable IPv6 in the tunnel rather than risk your IPv6 address leaking around the VPN. If this page shows an IPv6 address while your VPN is connected, run our WebRTC leak test next — leaks and IPv6 problems often travel together.

A VPN puts a middleman between you and the internet — deliberately. Your device opens an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server, and all your traffic exits from that server. Every website you visit then sees the server's IP address instead of yours. Your ISP still knows you're connected to a VPN, but can no longer see which sites you visit; the sites can no longer see who or where you really are.

The result is visible right in the tool above. Without a VPN, the panel shows your home connection: your city, your ISP's name, your timezone. Connect to a VPN server in, say, Amsterdam, hit Re-check, and everything flips — a Dutch IP, a hosting-company network name, an Amsterdam timezone. That flip is precisely what you're paying a VPN for, which is why we verify it on every server we test in our methodology.

Not all providers do this equally well. In our testing, the consistently clean performers — correct exit IP, no DNS or WebRTC leaks, working kill switch — include NordVPN and ExpressVPN, and the full picture is in our best VPN rankings. Masking your IP is table stakes; keeping it masked under failure conditions is what separates the good ones.

Each field in the panel above answers a different question. Here is what to look at, and what a "bad" result looks like:

The interpretation box below the grid applies these rules automatically. A VPN exit almost always belongs to a hosting or infrastructure company, so a datacenter-flavored network name is a good sign your VPN is on. A consumer ISP name plus a timezone that matches your device usually means you're exposed. And when the signals disagree, trust the manual test over any heuristic: toggle your VPN and watch whether the IP changes. For a deeper multi-check verdict, use our Is My VPN Working? tool, or investigate any specific address with the IP address lookup.

One caveat on accuracy: IP geolocation databases are good at country level, decent at city level, and unreliable at street level. If the city shown is 50 km off, that's normal — it reflects where your ISP registered the address block, not where you sit.

A VPN isn't the only way to change the address this page shows — but it's the only one we recommend for everyday use. Here is how the three realistic options stack up:

Free proxies deserve a special warning: an unencrypted middleman that can read your traffic is a downgrade, not a privacy tool. Tor is genuinely powerful but too slow for streaming or large downloads. For the combination most people need — hidden IP, encrypted traffic, and full-speed browsing — a reputable paid VPN wins, and if budget is the blocker, Proton VPN's free tier and the 30-day money-back guarantees on our top-ranked services cover the gap. See our speed benchmark data for exactly how much speed each provider keeps.

If you've ever checked your device settings and seen an address like 192.168.1.23, that's your private IP — an internal label your router assigns inside your home network. Ranges like 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, and 172.16–31.x.x never appear on the public internet. Your router translates between those private addresses and the single public IP your ISP assigned you — the one this page shows. A VPN changes your public IP; your private IP stays the same and doesn't need hiding, because nobody outside your network can see it anyway.