How to Check Your IP Address (IPv4 & IPv6)

Your public IP address is the address the rest of the internet sees when you connect. Checking it is usually a one-step task — and this page covers every common way to do it, on desktop, mobile and the command line.

What is a public IP address?

A public IP address is assigned to your connection by your internet service provider (ISP) or your router's WAN side. It is different from your private/local IP (like 192.168.1.100), which only works inside your home or office network. When people ask "what's my IP", they mean the public one.

Check it in a browser

Open ip.ls in any browser. The page immediately shows your current public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, plus the geolocation (city, country), ISP/ASN, timezone and continent they map to. No sign-up, no account, no API key.

Check it from the terminal

curl makes it scriptable and works on Linux, macOS, Windows (PowerShell) and Termux:

curl ip.ls            # plain text: your public IP
curl ip.ls/json       # structured JSON
curl 4.ip.ls          # force IPv4 only
curl 6.ip.ls          # force IPv6 only

The response is just your address — nothing else to parse. This is the same endpoint a developer would call from a script or a monitoring check.

Check it on a phone

Open ip.ls in the browser on your phone — it renders the same card on a small screen. There is no app to install and no data sent to a third party beyond the lookup itself.

Public IP vs private IP

• Public (WAN) IP: assigned by your ISP, unique on the internet, what remote servers see.
• Private (LAN) IP: assigned by your router, like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x, only meaningful inside your network.

If the address shown on ip.ls differs from the address you configure on your own device, you're looking at the public vs. private distinction — both are correct, just different layers of the network.