What Is a MAC Address? How to Find It on Any Device

What Is a MAC Address?

A MAC address (Media Access Control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network adapter — the Wi-Fi chip in your phone, the Ethernet port on your PC, the wireless card in a smart TV. It's sometimes called a physical address or hardware address, because the manufacturer writes it into the adapter at the factory.

Every network adapter has its own MAC address, so one laptop can have two: one for Wi-Fi and one for Ethernet. Devices on the same local network use MAC addresses to deliver data to each other — your router knows which device should get which packet by its MAC address. That happens at layer 2 (the data link layer) of the networking model, below IP addresses.

A MAC address looks like this: 3C:22:FB:9A:4E:1D — six pairs of hexadecimal digits.

MAC Address Format

A MAC address is 48 bits (6 bytes) long, written as 12 hexadecimal characters (0–9 and A–F). The digits are the same everywhere; only the separators change by operating system:

Upper and lower case mean the same thing, so 3C:22:FB and 3c:22:fb are identical. The special address FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF is the broadcast address: a frame sent to it reaches every device on the local network.

What the Numbers Mean: OUI and Device ID

A MAC address has two halves:

• First 3 bytes — the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier). Assigned by the IEEE to a manufacturer. 3C:22:FB belongs to Apple and A0:A4:C5 to Intel, for example, which is why a MAC address lookup can tell you who made a device.
• Last 3 bytes — the device-specific part. Chosen by the manufacturer so that every adapter it makes is unique.
• Two special bits in the first byte. The lowest bit says whether the address is unicast (0) or multicast (1). The second-lowest bit says whether it is universally administered (0, set by the manufacturer) or locally administered (1, set by software).

A quick way to spot a software-assigned address: if the second character is 2, 6, A or E (as in x2:, x6:, xA:, xE:), the address is locally administered — typically a randomized private MAC or a manually changed one, and a lookup won't name the device's maker.

How to Find Your MAC Address on Any Device

Here's exactly where to look on each system. If a device has both Wi-Fi and Ethernet, make sure you read the adapter you're actually using.

C:\> getmac /v

Connection Name Network Adapter Physical Address    Transport Name
=============== =============== =================== ==========================================================
Wi-Fi           Intel(R) Wi-Fi  A0-A4-C5-9A-4E-1D   \Device\Tcpip_{...}
Ethernet        Realtek PCIe Gb 00-E0-4C-68-1A-2B   Media disconnected

On Windows, ipconfig /all lists a Physical Address under each adapter, and getmac /v cuts long names to 15 characters. On a Mac, en0 is usually the Wi-Fi adapter on laptops; ifconfig shows the address in use on the current network, which is the private one if Private Wi-Fi Address is on. On phones, the address in About is the hardware address, but your router may see a private one. To see the address used on a given network: on an iPhone, Settings › Wi-Fi › (i) next to the network › Wi-Fi Address; on Android, open that network's details.

MAC Address vs IP Address

People often confuse the two. Both identify a device, but at different levels:

Devices on your network, the router included, link the two with ARP (Address Resolution Protocol), which finds the MAC address that belongs to a local IPv4 address; IPv6 does the same job with Neighbor Discovery. To see your public IP address, use What Is My IP; to see who owns any IP address, use IP Lookup.

Private and Randomized MAC Addresses

Because a fixed MAC address could be used to track a device from one Wi-Fi network to another, modern systems hide it. iPhones and iPads (iOS 14 and later) use a "Private Wi-Fi Address" for each network, and Macs with macOS Sequoia 15 or later do too; on iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia you can set it to Off, Fixed or Rotating per network (Apple). Android 10 and later randomizes the MAC address by default, and Windows 10 and 11 offer "Random hardware addresses" in Wi-Fi settings.

A randomized address is locally administered, so a vendor lookup returns no manufacturer. It can also break things that depend on a fixed MAC address: a DHCP reservation, MAC filtering on the router, or a hotel Wi-Fi login that suddenly asks you to sign in again. If that happens, turn off the private address (or choose Fixed) for that one network: on iPhone tap the (i) next to the network, on a Mac use Details next to the network in Wi-Fi settings, and on Android open the network's settings and choose the device MAC under Privacy.

What MAC Addresses Are Used For

• Delivering data on a local network — switches and routers forward frames to the right device by MAC address.
• DHCP reservations — tell your router to always give a device (a printer, a game console, a NAS) the same IP address, so bookmarks to it keep working. Our router login guide shows how to reach your router's settings, and ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE covers what happens when a device's address changes.
• MAC filtering — allow or block devices on Wi-Fi. If a device connects but gets no internet, a filter entry with a typo is one cause (see Wi-Fi connected but no internet).
• Identifying unknown devices — a vendor lookup on an unfamiliar MAC in your router's device list tells you what it probably is.
• Wake-on-LAN — the "magic packet" that powers on a sleeping computer contains its MAC address repeated 16 times, so only that machine reacts.

Can a MAC Address Be Changed or Tracked?

The address burned into the hardware usually can't be changed, but the address a device uses can be changed in software — that's how randomization works, and it's also called MAC spoofing. Changing the address your own device uses is a normal, supported setting — for example, to replace an old router without re-registering with your ISP.

Your MAC address does not travel across the internet. Each router rewrites the layer-2 header at every hop, so websites and remote servers never see it. Your ISP's network sees only the MAC of the device connected to its line, usually your router, but if that router is one the ISP supplies and manages, its app or support team can usually see the router's list of connected devices, with their MAC addresses.

Look Up Who Made a Device from Its MAC Address

Paste any MAC address into our MAC address lookup to see the manufacturer from the IEEE OUI database, whether the address is locally administered (randomized or spoofed), and whether it's unicast or multicast. Need sample addresses for testing or documentation? The MAC address generator creates valid random MACs in any format.