What Is My Public IP Address?
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The number shown above is your public IP address — the identifier every website and online service currently sees when your home network connects to them. It's yours for as long as your internet service provider (ISP) has assigned it to your connection, which, depending on your provider, could be anywhere from a few hours to several months.
What is a public IP address, exactly?
A public IP address is the address your ISP assigns to the router or modem at your home, making your network reachable on the internet. Every device you connect to that router — your laptop, phone, smart TV, game console — shares this single address when talking to the outside world, even though each device also has its own separate address inside your home network.
Address allocation itself is coordinated globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which distributes large address blocks to regional registries such as ARIN and RIPE NCC, who in turn allocate smaller blocks to ISPs. Your ISP then hands out individual addresses from its block to subscribers — which is also why your public IP's approximate location typically reflects your ISP's regional infrastructure rather than your literal address.
Public IP vs. private IP — two different numbers
It's easy to conflate these, but your network is actually running two separate addressing systems at once:
- Public IP: the address shown at the top of this page — how the entire internet sees your network.
- Private IP: the address your router assigns to each device inside your home, typically something in the
192.168.x.x,10.x.x.x, or172.16.x.x–172.31.x.xranges reserved specifically for this purpose under RFC 1918.
Your router uses a process called Network Address Translation (NAT) to rewrite traffic from every private-IP device on your network so it appears to come from the single public IP address — which is also why an external website can't distinguish which specific device on your network sent a request, only that it came from your home connection as a whole.
Static vs. dynamic — does your public IP address stay the same?
Most residential connections use a dynamic IP address, assigned automatically through DHCP and periodically reissued by the ISP — partly for practical address-management reasons, and partly because IPv4 addresses are a genuinely scarce resource that ISPs need to reallocate efficiently. How often it actually changes varies enormously by provider: some reassign addresses every time your modem reconnects, others keep the same lease bound to your hardware for weeks or months at a stretch.
A static IP address stays fixed indefinitely and is usually a paid add-on, common on business-tier plans or requested by people who self-host a server, run remote access to a home network, or need a predictable address for something like a security camera system.
IPv4 vs. IPv6 — why your home network might have both
Most home networks today run dual-stack, meaning they hold a public IPv4 address and a public IPv6 address simultaneously. This matters more for privacy than it might seem:
IPv4 address space ran out years ago, so many ISPs now place multiple households behind Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), meaning several unrelated homes can genuinely share the same public IPv4 address at the same time. IPv6, by contrast, has such a vast address space that ISPs don't need to share it — so your public IPv6 address is far more likely to correspond uniquely to your specific connection, which is one reason a full IPv6 leak test matters even when your IPv4 address alone looks harmless.
What can someone actually do with your public IP address?
Realistically, and without exaggeration:
- Approximate location. City or metro-region level at best — not a street address, not GPS-level precision.
- Your ISP's identity. Trivial to determine from public address-allocation records.
- Cross-site correlation. Because your IP is visible to every site you visit without logging in, it can be used as one signal among several to link activity across otherwise-unrelated sites — see how targeted advertising tracks you across sites — particularly if your IP stays static or long-lived.
- A target for network-level attacks. Most notably in online gaming, where a rival player who obtains your IP through a booter service or peer-to-peer connection can direct a DDoS attack at your home connection specifically.
What it does not hand someone, on its own: your legal name or street address. That mapping exists only in your ISP's subscriber records, accessible typically only through a legal subpoena.
How to hide or change your public IP address
A few genuinely different approaches, each with different tradeoffs:
- Power-cycle your modem. Sometimes forces a new dynamic lease — not guaranteed, depends entirely on your ISP's DHCP configuration.
- Use a VPN. Doesn't change your public IP address itself; instead, it masks it from the websites you visit by routing your traffic through the VPN provider's server, so external sites see the VPN's IP instead of yours. Run a full IP leak test afterward — a surprising number of VPN configurations still leak the real address through WebRTC, DNS, or IPv6.
- Use Tor. The Tor Project routes traffic through multiple volunteer relays instead of a single provider, at a real cost to connection speed.
- Request a static IP change from your ISP. Possible on some plans, but rarely solves a privacy concern — it just fixes the exact number an outside observer would need to track in the first place.
Public IP vs. router IP vs. device IP
One more distinction worth locking in, since these three terms get used interchangeably in casual conversation but mean different things:
- Public IP address — your router's internet-facing address, shown at the top of this page.
- Router IP address — usually refers to the router's private local address (often
192.168.1.1or192.168.0.1), which you'd type into a browser to reach its admin settings page. - Device IP address — the private local address your router assigns to each individual device on the network, invisible to anything outside your home.
Is my public IP address the same as my router's IP address?
Sort of, but they're two different numbers doing two different jobs. Your router has a public IP address facing the internet — that's your "public IP address," the one this page just showed you. It also has a private, local IP address (typically something like 192.168.1.1) that only your own devices can see, which is how your laptop or phone talks to the router itself to configure Wi-Fi settings.
Can someone find my home address from my IP address?
Not directly, and not precisely. A public IP address reveals your ISP and an approximate region — typically city-level at best, sometimes just the wider metro area — because IP geolocation databases are built from where your ISP has registered that address block, not from GPS data. Mapping an IP address to a specific subscriber's name and street address requires a legal subpoena served directly to the ISP, which only law enforcement or parties in active litigation can typically obtain.
Why does this page show a different city than where I actually live?
IP geolocation is inherently approximate. ISPs allocate address blocks regionally, not house by house, and the database a lookup service uses may reflect where your ISP's regional hub is registered rather than your literal street. It's common to see a neighboring city, or even a metro area an hour away, especially outside dense urban centers.
Does restarting my router change my public IP address?
Sometimes. Most residential ISPs assign IP addresses dynamically through DHCP, and a power cycle can trigger a new lease — but many ISPs bind a lease to your modem's hardware (MAC) address for days or weeks, so a restart alone often reconnects you to the exact same address. Results vary by provider, and there's no universal guarantee either way.
Is having a public IPv6 address worse for privacy than IPv4?
In one specific way, yes. IPv4 exhaustion means many ISPs place multiple households behind Carrier-Grade NAT, so several homes can share the same public IPv4 address — which actually blurs individual identification somewhat. IPv6's address space is so vast that ISPs don't need to share addresses this way, so a device's public IPv6 address is far more likely to uniquely correspond to your specific connection, and in some configurations, even to a specific device.
If a VPN hides my IP from websites, can my ISP still see what I'm doing?
Your ISP can always see that your public IP address is connected to a VPN server's IP address, along with the volume and timing of that traffic — that part isn't hidden. What a properly configured VPN hides from your ISP is the content and destination of your traffic once it enters the encrypted tunnel: which specific websites you visit and what you send them.