Here’s What Your Private IP Address Means, and How You Find It

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• What Is a Private IP Address?
• How to Find Your Private IP Address
• Private IP addresses help routers route data to specific devices on a network.
• Private IP is like the address of your home inside a gated colony, while public IP is of the colony.
• Finding your private IP is crucial for networking, and it can be easily done on any device.

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An IP address is one of the most important aspects of your digital identity. It’s how websites and servers can tell you apart from the millions of requests they serve every day. Despite that, they only get to see your public IP address. Your private IP address stays restricted within your home or office network, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t do anything.

What Is a Private IP Address?

IP addresses work a lot like traditional addresses. If you were to receive a letter, it’d be posted to your physical address. Similarly, if you were to receive a message over the internet, be it an email, a webpage, or a web request from a server, they’re all sent to your IP address.

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However, modern-day networks go through routers. For example, if you’ve got two laptops connected to the internet via the same router, they’ll have the same public IP address, as the internet gateway for both devices is the same. However, the router still needs to determine what data to send to which laptop. This is where private IP addresses come in.

When you connect to the internet, your router automatically assigns your PC, laptop, console, smartphone, or whatever device you’re using a private IP address so it can keep track of the web requests that a particular device is sending and receiving. These IP addresses, also known as reserved IP addresses, are generally assigned from the following IP pools:

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• 192.168.0.0 192.168.255.255 (65,536 IP addresses)
• 172.16.0.0 172.31.255.255 (1,048,576 IP addresses)
• 10.0.0.0 10.255.255.255 (16,777,216 IP addresses)

In the example above, there are three devices on the network—the router itself and the two laptops. This means the private IP assignments will look something like this, provided the router is using the 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255 IP address range.

• Router: 192.168.0.1
• Laptop 1: 192.168.0.2
• Laptop 2: 192.168.0.3

Now whether you’re accessing the internet from Laptop 1 or Laptop 2, the router can keep track of data flowing in and out and route data packets to the correct device.

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Private IP vs Public IP

Private IP and public IP can be confusing terms. After all, how can one IP address be public or private?

Think of it as a gated colony. Your private IP address is the address of your house inside the gated colony, while your public IP address is the address of the colony itself. This allows your address to be split into two parts—a public-facing “colony” address that’s easy to locate for anyone and a private “home” address only you and the other people in the colony know.

Your router does this conversion using a method called NAT or Network Address Translation. Anything from your device that needs to go to the internet goes through your router’s NAT layer which converts your private IP address to a public one keeping track of any changes it made. When the information comes back, your router reverses this change and forwards relevant information back to your device.

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For this reason, the public IP address of multiple devices connected to a single router is the same, as that’s the IP address assigned to the router itself. Private IP addresses, however, are different and used by the router to determine what information goes where, which is also why they’re called local IP addresses. This also helps protect you online, as hackers can do bad things if they find out your IP address as they can’t access your private IP address from outside the network.

How to Find Your Private IP Address

Knowing your private IP address is important if you’re setting up devices, communications, or any other services within your local network. You might also want to set up a static IP address for a particular device so it doesn’t change everything it reconnects to the router.

There are tons of ways to find all IP addresses on a network. In any case, finding your private or local IP address is a matter of typing in a few commands whether you’re on your Windows machine or iPhone.

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Windows

Finding your private IP address on Windows is rather simple.

1. Right-click the Start menu icon and click on Windows PowerShell or Terminal. Either of the two options should appear based on your Windows settings.
2. When the window opens, type ipconfig and hit Enter.
3. Scroll down to find your private IP address.

There are multiple ways of checking your IP address on Windows. Whether you’re using Command Prompt (also called Windows Terminal now) or Windows PowerShell to check your IP or MAC address, you’ll get results in just one command.

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Linux

There are dozens of commands that you can use to find your IP address in Linux. As long as you’re on a Unix-based Linux distro, the ifconfig command will tell you plenty. But there alternatives like hostname -I and ip -4 addr among others that can fetch the private IP address of a Linux machine.

macOS

We’ve also covered how you can find or even change your IP address on macOS. While the address is visible both in systems settings and via the ipconfig terminal command, using the latter is generally faster as you don’t have to click through multiple system windows.

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Android

if you’re on an Android device, follow these steps to find your private IP address:

1. Head over to the device settings and tap Network and internet.
2. Tap Internet.
3. Locate the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to and tap the settings gear icon next to it.
4. Scroll down to the bottom to find your IP address and other network information.Close

iOS

If you’re using iOS, follow these steps to find your private IP address:

1. Head over to your phone settings and tap Settings.
2. Tap Wi-Fi.
3. Tap the information icon next to the Wi-Fi network’s name.
4. Scroll down and your private IP will be listed in the IPv4 section.Close

Your Private IP address isn’t something you’ll need every day. However, it is handy to know in case you’re making network changes, setting up your private servers, or interacting with any services that operate inside a closed network.