What Is My IPv6 Address? Check Your IPv6 Instantly

Why IPv6 exists at all

IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, formally defined in RFC 2460 (1998) and updated in RFC 8200 (2017). It was designed for one reason above everything else: the 32-bit IPv4 space of about 4.3 billion addresses was never going to be enough for a world with smartphones, smart fridges, and billions of connected things. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, which yields 2¹²⁸ possible values — roughly 340 undecillion, or 340 followed by 36 zeros. Every grain of sand on Earth could have a few billion IPv6 addresses and we’d still have plenty left.

Beyond the address space, IPv6 brings a simpler packet header, mandatory IPsec support, stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC), and no more need for NAT. It’s a cleaner protocol that took shape after 15 years of real-world IPv4 experience.

How an IPv6 address is written

The canonical form is eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, separated by colons:

2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

That’s 128 bits total: 8 groups × 16 bits each. Hex is used instead of decimal because it makes each 4-bit nibble map cleanly to one character, keeping addresses compact.

Shorthand rule 1: drop leading zeros

Within any group, leading zeros can be omitted. So 0db8 becomes db8, and 0000 becomes 0. The address above compresses to:

2001:db8:85a3:0:0:8a2e:370:7334

Shorthand rule 2: collapse zeros with ::

A single run of consecutive all-zero groups can be replaced with a double colon (::). You can only do this once per address, because otherwise a parser couldn’t tell how many groups the double colon covers. Applying both rules:

2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334

All three forms represent the same 128-bit number. The loopback address 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 is almost always written as ::1 for the same reason.

IPv6 address types

IPv6 divides its huge space into functional ranges, each with a reserved prefix:

• Global unicast — 2000::/3. Publicly routable, the IPv6 equivalent of a regular public IPv4.
• Link-local — fe80::/10. Auto-assigned to every IPv6 interface, only valid on the local network segment. If you see an address starting with fe80::, that’s link-local.
• Unique local — fc00::/7. The IPv6 analog to IPv4’s RFC 1918 private ranges, intended for internal networks.
• Multicast — ff00::/8. Used for one-to-many delivery. IPv6 has no broadcast — multicast replaces it.
• Loopback — ::1. The single address for “this device” (IPv4’s 127.0.0.1).
• Unspecified — ::. Placeholder for “no address yet”.

How to find your IPv6 address

You might have several IPv6 addresses at once on the same interface: a link-local address (always present), one or more global unicast addresses from your ISP, and possibly temporary privacy addresses that rotate to make tracking harder. All of them are active simultaneously.

Windows

Open Command Prompt and run ipconfig. Each adapter section shows “IPv6 Address” (global), “Temporary IPv6 Address” (privacy), and “Link-local IPv6 Address” (the fe80:: one, with a %zone suffix). For full detail, use ipconfig /all.

macOS

Go to System Settings → Network, click your active connection, then Details → TCP/IP. IPv6 addresses appear under “IPv6 Address”. From Terminal, ifconfig en0 | grep inet6 lists everything the interface holds.

Linux

Run ip -6 addr or ip -6 a for a concise view. To check IPv6 reachability to a known host: ping6 ipv6.google.com (or on modern distros, plain ping auto-detects).

Browser and web tools

The simplest test is to visit a site that explicitly displays IPv6 — ours does, when your ISP gives you one. If the tool shows only an IPv4 address, your connection is IPv4-only for that request.

IPv6 adoption in 2026

Google, which measures IPv6 connectivity to its services, reports global adoption fluctuating around 45–50% in 2026. On March 28, 2026 it briefly crossed 50.1% for the first time in history — a symbolic milestone that took the Internet roughly 30 years from IPv6’s original 1996 design work to reach. Weekend traffic consistently runs a few points higher than weekday traffic because home broadband has better IPv6 penetration than corporate networks.

The geography is uneven. France leads the developed markets at around 86%, followed by India (~75%), Germany (~72%), and the US (~55%). Most of Africa, the Middle East, and large parts of Latin America still sit below 20%. Mobile carriers pushed adoption the hardest because running an IPv6-only access network with NAT64 at the edge is cheaper than operating giant CGNAT farms full-time.

If your ISP is one of the holdouts, you may have no native IPv6 at all. That’s fine — virtually every public service still answers on IPv4 too, and dual-stack setups use whichever protocol works best per connection.

Enabling IPv6 on your router

Most modern routers enable IPv6 by default if the ISP advertises it. If you’re not getting one, check the WAN settings for an IPv6 section — typical options are “DHCPv6”, “SLAAC”, or “6rd/6in4 tunnel”. Some ISPs hand out a /56 or /64 prefix, which the router then subdivides and advertises to your local network. A reboot of the modem and router often triggers a fresh assignment.

Common troubleshooting

If IPv6 “works” but sites feel slow, you may have a broken IPv6 path where DNS returns AAAA records but packets fail to route. Modern browsers use “Happy Eyeballs” (RFC 8305) to race IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously and use whichever succeeds first, which usually masks bad IPv6, but not always. Disabling IPv6 as a diagnostic step is legitimate, though rarely the right permanent fix.

Privacy extensions and why your IPv6 changes

One quirk of IPv6 surprises people: your address may shift every few hours or every day, without any obvious trigger. This is intentional, and it’s called SLAAC privacy extensions (RFC 4941, later updated by RFC 8981).

Classic IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) built the last 64 bits of your address from your device’s MAC address. That made every IPv6 address a permanent hardware fingerprint — any site you visit could correlate you across networks forever. Not great. RFC 4941 fixed this by generating a random interface identifier every few hours, so your public-facing IPv6 rotates while your internal routing stays stable.

On Windows, temporary addresses are on by default since Vista. On macOS and iOS, they’re on by default since 10.7. On Linux, check /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/*/use_tempaddr—a value of 2 means “prefer temporary addresses for outbound connections”, which is the safe setting.

Tunnels and transition technologies

If your ISP doesn’t offer native IPv6, there are three historical workarounds you may still encounter. 6to4 (RFC 3056) encapsulates IPv6 inside IPv4 packets using addresses in 2002::/16; it’s been largely deprecated because of unreliable return paths. Teredo (RFC 4380) tunnels through NAT using UDP and addresses in 2001::/32; Microsoft disabled it by default in Windows 10. 6rd (RFC 5969) is an ISP-operated variant that’s still in limited use. If you see one of these prefixes in your address, you’re tunneled rather than natively connected.