How to Find Your IP Address on a Mac

Key takeaways

• Your local IP (usually 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x) is in System Settings › Network › Details › TCP/IP. In Terminal, ipconfig getifaddr en0 prints it.
• Your public IP only shows up when you ask a server outside your network: curl -4 ip.getpublicip.com.
• en0 is Wi-Fi on a MacBook but Ethernet on a Mac mini. If ipconfig getifaddr en0 prints nothing, your connection has another name, often en1.
• On a network with IPv6, curl ifconfig.me prints your IPv6 address and the usual dig command prints nothing. Add -4 for IPv4.
• If your router's WAN address differs from your public IP, your ISP is using CGNAT, and connections from the internet can't reach your Mac.

Local IP vs public IP on a Mac

Your router gives each device at home a local (private) IP address from a range reserved for private networks by RFC 1918: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16. That's the address macOS shows you, and nothing outside your home can reach it.

When the Mac connects to a website, the router rewrites the traffic to come from its own public IP address, the one your ISP assigned. This is NAT (network address translation). Websites and game servers only ever see the public address, and macOS can't know it without asking a server outside your network.

With a VPN connected, websites see the VPN's address, and the commands below report that address instead of your ISP's.

Find your local IP address in System Settings

These are the steps in Apple's Mac User Guide for macOS Ventura and later:

1. Choose Apple menu › System Settings.
2. Click Network in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down.
3. Click the connection you're using, Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
4. Click Details, then TCP/IP.
5. Read the IP address field. That's your local IPv4 address. The Router field below it is your router's address.

On Wi-Fi there's a quicker way: hold Option and click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. Apple's guide to the Wi-Fi status menu says this shows the IP address and router address under the network you're connected to, along with the channel and security type.

macOS Monterey and earlier have System Preferences instead. Open System Preferences › Network and select the connection: the IP address is in the status text, and Advanced › TCP/IP has the full details.

Find your local IP address in Terminal

Open Terminal from Spotlight (Command-Space, then type Terminal) or from Applications › Utilities. Then run:

Copyipconfig getifaddr en0

It prints the IPv4 address of en0 and nothing else:

Copy192.168.1.20

On a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, en0 is Wi-Fi, so that's usually all you need.

If ipconfig getifaddr en0 prints nothing

On Macs with a built-in Ethernet port, en0 is the Ethernet port, and Wi-Fi gets another name. Our Mac mini was online over Wi-Fi, and ipconfig getifaddr en0 printed nothing at all and exited with status 1. Its Wi-Fi is en1.

To see which name belongs to which port:

Copynetworksetup -listallhardwareports

Trimmed output from our Mac mini:

CopyHardware Port: Ethernet
Device: en0

Hardware Port: Wi-Fi
Device: en1

To skip the guessing, ask macOS which interface it uses to reach the internet and print that one's address:

Copyipconfig getifaddr "$(route -n get default | awk '/interface:/{print $2}')"

With a full-tunnel VPN connected, the default route goes through the VPN's utun interface, so this prints the VPN's internal address instead.

See every address, IPv6 included: ifconfig

Copyifconfig en0

Output (addresses replaced with examples):

Copyen0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    ether 3a:5c:91:07:be:42
    inet6 fe80::4d1:a46b:d416:9156%en0 prefixlen 64 secured scopeid 0x12
    inet6 2001:db8:4c2a:1e00:1c8a:5f2e:9b7d:3a10 prefixlen 64 autoconf secured
    inet6 2001:db8:4c2a:1e00:84f3:22c1:6e0a:b5d7 prefixlen 64 autoconf temporary
    inet 192.168.1.20 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
    status: active

• inet is the IPv4 address. netmask 0xffffff00 is 255.255.255.0, a /24.
• inet6 fe80::… is a link-local address. It only works on your own network segment.
• The other two inet6 lines are global IPv6 addresses. secured is the stable one. temporary changes regularly, and macOS uses it for outgoing connections by default (sysctl net.inet6.ip6.prefer_tempaddr is 1).

networksetup -getinfo Wi-Fi gives a tidier summary of the IP address, subnet mask and router. Don't rely on it for IPv6: on our Mac it said IPv6 IP address: none while ifconfig listed two global IPv6 addresses on the same interface.

Find your public IP address in Terminal

Copycurl -4 ip.getpublicip.com

Output:

CopyIP Address: 203.0.113.42
ISP: Example ISP
City: Chicago
Country: United States

Swap -4 for -6 to get your public IPv6 address. If your network has no IPv6, curl fails with a connection error.

On IPv6, your router usually doesn't translate addresses, so the global address in ifconfig is often the one websites see, but not always. On our test network, the address curl -6 reported didn't match either IPv6 address on the Mac, because the router translates IPv6 too, so check with curl -6 rather than reading it off ifconfig.

For the bare address with nothing else, which is handy in scripts:

Copycurl -4 -s ifconfig.me

Why plain curl ifconfig.me can print an IPv6 address

On a network with IPv6, curl tries IPv6 first. On our Mac, curl -s ifconfig.me and curl https://api.getpublicip.com/ip both returned the IPv6 address. Port forwarding rules and most allowlists want the IPv4 address, so add -4 whenever you need it.

There's no wget on a Mac

macOS 27.0.1 includes curl, dig, host and nslookup, but not wget. The wget -qO- one-liners in many Linux guides fail with zsh: command not found: wget. Use curl, or install wget with Homebrew (brew install wget).

The DNS method: add -4 to dig

You can also get your public IP from a DNS lookup instead of a web request:

Copydig -4 +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

Leave out -4 and, on a network with IPv6, dig sends the query to OpenDNS over IPv6. On our Mac that came back empty (status: NOERROR, zero answers), because OpenDNS reports the address your query came from, and an IPv6 query can't tell it your IPv4 address. The IPv6 version works the same way:

Copydig -6 +short AAAA myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com

Google's equivalent returns the address in quotes:

Copydig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com

Find your public IP without Terminal

Open getpublicip.com in a browser. The boxes at the top of this page show the same thing: your public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

If you use iCloud Private Relay, a website open in Safari sees a temporary relay address, not yours. Apple says the second relay "generates a temporary IP address" for the connection. Use the Terminal commands, which don't go through Safari, or open the page in another browser.

Your router's admin page also shows a public-facing address, usually labelled WAN or Internet. Comparing the two is how you check for CGNAT.

Is your Mac behind CGNAT?

Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) means your ISP puts one more NAT between your router and the internet, and shares one public address among many customers. It's most common on mobile networks, and more and more fibre ISPs use it where IPv4 addresses are scarce. Outbound traffic works normally, but nothing on the internet can start a connection to you, so port forwarding on your router does nothing.

To check:

1. Find your router's address: the Router field in Details › TCP/IP, or the gateway line from route -n get default in Terminal.
2. Type that address into a browser and log in to the router.
3. Find the WAN or Internet address on its status page.
4. Compare it with curl -4 ip.getpublicip.com.

If the two match, you have your own public IPv4 address and port forwarding can work. If they differ, you're behind CGNAT. A WAN address from 100.64.0.0 to 100.127.255.255 settles it: that's 100.64.0.0/10, the range RFC 6598 reserves for carrier-grade NAT.

To host something on your Mac from behind CGNAT, such as a Plex library or a Minecraft server, you need a way in that doesn't depend on your ISP. Self-hosting behind CGNAT compares the options. For a plain website, Cloudflare Tunnel is free and usually enough. UDP services such as game servers, and anything that needs the visitor's real address, are harder; the guide covers which tools handle them.

GetPublicIP for Mac gives your Mac a public IPv4 and IPv6 address of its own, routed to it over a WireGuard tunnel, with the ports you choose forwarded to it. It works behind CGNAT, because the Mac connects out to our server.

Your MAC address is a different thing

A MAC address (media access control address) is the hardware address of a network port, written as six pairs of hex digits like 3a:5c:91:07:be:42. It has nothing to do with Apple's Macs. Your router uses it to tell devices apart, and it doesn't travel past your router.

On Wi-Fi, macOS can use a private Wi-Fi address in place of the hardware one. Apple's Wi-Fi settings guide lists three modes, Off, Fixed and Rotating, under Wi-Fi › Details, along with the current Wi-Fi address and the hardware MAC address.

In Terminal, the two are different commands:

Copyifconfig en0 | awk '/ether/{print $2}'    # the address in use now (may be private)
networksetup -getmacaddress en0           # the hardware address

On our Mac mini, whose Wi-Fi is en1, the two returned different addresses with a private address turned on.

Frequently Asked Questions