How do I check my iPhone's IP address without Wi-Fi?

iOS does not display the address assigned on cellular data anywhere in Settings. The reliable method is to open Safari on mobile data and load a page that reads your address back to you, such as our homepage device check. Turn Wi-Fi off first, and disable any VPN or iCloud Private Relay, or you will see the proxy's address instead of your own.

Where is the IP address in iPhone Settings?

Go to Settings, Wi-Fi, and tap the (i) button next to the network you are connected to. The IP Address row under the IPv4 section is your local address on that network, alongside the Subnet Mask and the Router's own address. This screen only appears for Wi-Fi connections.

Why is my iPhone's IP address a long string with colons?

That is an IPv6 address. Mobile carriers deployed IPv6 early because the supply of IPv4 addresses ran out, so on many cellular networks it is now the primary protocol. Your iPhone may hold both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address at once, and the IPv6 one often rotates by design for privacy.

Can someone find my exact location from my iPhone's IP address?

No. IP geolocation maps an address block to the provider that owns it, giving a city or region at best, and on mobile networks it is frequently off by a long distance because traffic is routed through distant gateways. An IP does not reveal your name, street address or coordinates.

How to Find Your iPhone's IP Address (Wi-Fi and Cellular)

Your iPhone does not have one IP address. It has at least two, they serve completely different purposes, and confusing them is the reason most people end up frustrated when they try to look one up. There is the local IP that your Wi-Fi router hands out inside your home, and the public IP that the rest of the internet sees. On cellular data there is no router at all, which is exactly why the usual Settings screen comes up empty.

This guide covers where each address lives, how to read your public IP on mobile data with no Wi-Fi anywhere in sight, what IPv6 changes on modern carrier networks, why the numbers keep moving, and why an IP address is a much weaker location signal than people assume.

Local IP vs public IP

The distinction is worth getting straight before you go hunting through Settings.

Your local (private) IP address is assigned by your Wi-Fi router to each device on your home or office network. It typically looks like 192.168.1.24, 10.0.0.8 or 172.16.x.x. It is meaningful only inside that network — millions of homes are using 192.168.1.24 right now with no conflict at all. You need it for printers, network drives, casting devices, port forwarding and router configuration.
Your public IP address is assigned by your internet provider or mobile carrier. It is what every website, game server and app sees when you connect. All the devices behind a single home router usually share one public IP; your router translates between the two worlds using NAT (Network Address Translation).

So when someone says "what's your IP?", the answer depends entirely on who is asking. A support technician setting up a printer wants the local one. A game server admin adding you to an allow-list wants the public one.

Finding your local IP on Wi-Fi

This one lives in Settings and takes seconds:

Open Settings › Wi-Fi.
Tap the (i) button next to the network you are connected to.
Under the IPv4 Address section you will see IP Address, along with Subnet Mask and Router.

The Router value is your router's own local address — type it into Safari's address bar and you will usually reach the router's admin page. If the screen also shows an IPv6 Address section, your network supports IPv6 as well; both can be active at once.

While you are on that screen, note the Wi-Fi Address row too. That is a different kind of identifier entirely — the hardware address of the radio, covered in our guide to finding your iPhone's MAC address.

How to check your iPhone's IP address without Wi-Fi

This is where people get stuck. On cellular data, Settings gives you nothing. There is no equivalent of the Wi-Fi (i) screen for mobile data — iOS simply does not display the address your carrier assigned. Tapping around Settings › Cellular will not reveal it, and no amount of digging changes that.

The reliable answer is to ask a website. Any web server you connect to necessarily knows the address your request arrived from, so a page can simply read it back to you. Open Safari on cellular data and visit our homepage device check — it displays your public IP address straight away, along with your device, operating system, browser and connection type. No app, no account, nothing to install.

Two things to keep in mind when reading it:

Turn Wi-Fi off first if you specifically want your cellular address. If Wi-Fi is connected, your iPhone will route through it and you will see your broadband provider's IP instead of your carrier's.
Turn off any VPN or Private Relay. A VPN, or iCloud Private Relay while browsing in Safari, replaces the address a website sees with one belonging to the relay or VPN provider. That is the whole point of them — but it means the read-out is showing the proxy, not you.

What about the private address on cellular?

On mobile data your carrier assigns an address to the device directly; there is no home router in between. In practice most carriers now place customers behind carrier-grade NAT, meaning many subscribers share one public IPv4 address, or they issue IPv6 only. Either way, the address a website reports is the one that matters for anything you would practically want to do with it.

IPv4 and IPv6 on mobile networks

You may check your IP on cellular and get something that looks nothing like the familiar four numbers — a long string like 2600:1010:b05f:... with colons instead of dots. That is IPv6.

The world ran out of unique IPv4 addresses years ago. IPv6 uses a vastly larger address space, and mobile carriers were among the first to deploy it at scale, so on modern cellular networks IPv6 is often the primary protocol. Practical implications:

Your iPhone may show both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address on the same connection — this is normal and is called dual-stack.
Different websites may report different addresses for you depending on whether they support IPv6.
An IPv6 address on iOS often changes more frequently by design, because temporary privacy addresses are used for outbound connections to make long-term tracking harder.

Why your IP address keeps changing

Almost nobody has a fixed IP address, and that is deliberate. Providers allocate addresses from a shared pool, and your iPhone can pick up a new one whenever:

You move between Wi-Fi and cellular, or between different Wi-Fi networks.
You move between cell towers, or the device re-registers on the network.
Your router or modem restarts, or your ISP's lease expires and renews.
Airplane Mode is toggled, or the iPhone is restarted.

Static addresses generally exist only as a paid business option. If something you are doing depends on an IP staying the same — a firewall rule or a remote-access allow-list — expect to update it regularly, or use a service designed to track a changing address.

An IP address is not a precise location

Films have a lot to answer for here. An IP address does not reveal a street address, and it certainly does not pinpoint a person.

What geolocation services actually do is look up which provider owns a block of addresses and where that block is registered or typically used. The result is approximate: a city, a metro region, sometimes only a country. On mobile networks it can be badly wrong, because carrier traffic is often routed through gateways hundreds of miles from the handset — a phone in one city routinely appears to be in another entirely.

What an IP address does not tell anyone: your name, your address, your exact coordinates, or who you are. Linking an address to a subscriber requires the provider's own records, which are released to law enforcement under legal process, not to a website or a random person on the internet.

This is also why an IP address is useless for finding a lost iPhone. Real device location comes from GPS, Wi-Fi positioning and Apple's Find My network, tied to your Apple Account — not from an address a website read. If that is your actual goal, see how to request a location on Find My iPhone or, if a device is showing stale data, why Find My iPhone is not updating.

In short

For your local IP, go to Settings › Wi-Fi › (i) and read the IP Address row. For your public IP — the only one available on cellular, since iOS never shows it in Settings — load a page that reads it back to you, such as our homepage device check, with Wi-Fi and any VPN switched off. Expect the number to change over time, expect IPv6 on modern carrier networks, and treat any location it implies as a rough regional guess rather than a fact.