Check your VPN's IP address

A VPN swaps the address and the country that websites see for the VPN server's. Here is how to check that it really does, in a minute, with nothing to install.

What a VPN changes

When you visit a website, it sees an address (your IP address) and can tell roughly which country it belongs to. Without a VPN that is your internet provider's. With one, it is the VPN server's, so the site sees the server's country instead of yours. That is the first thing to check, and it takes two readings.

Check it by hand

1. With the VPN off, open https://1.1.1.1/cdn-cgi/trace. It is Cloudflare's own page, not ours: your browser asks Cloudflare, and we are not involved. It shows plain lines of text. Look for ip=, the address the internet sees, and loc=, the two-letter code of the country it is in (such as US or DE). Note both.
2. Turn the VPN on, pick a server in a country other than your own, and reload the same page. ip= should be a different address, and loc= the country you picked.
3. The same from a terminal. Run curl https://1.1.1.1/cdn-cgi/trace and read the same two lines. On Windows PowerShell, type curl.exe, because plain curl there is something else. This is the way to check a router, a server or a command-line VPN.

If something is off

• Nothing changed. The VPN is probably not carrying that traffic. Check that its app says it is connected, reconnect, and try again, in another browser if you can. A browser extension or a split-tunnelling setting can leave some traffic outside the VPN.
• The address changed but the country is not the one you picked. A country is a database's best guess about an address, and some providers run servers in a different place from the one they list. Our tables show both: see how we check a server's location, or read why a VPN server can be somewhere else than its label.
• A changed address is not the whole story. A VPN can still leak things the address test cannot see, such as the sites your device looks up (DNS) or a second, IPv6 address. Those are separate checks: see our VPN leak test guide.

What our data shows

Every row in a node's results table shows two locations side by side: Claimed, where the provider's own server list says the server is, and Measured, where two outside databases place the address the server really uses. When the two differ, the server is not where it says it is. We never judge which VPN is better: you can sort a table and read the rows.

How each check works, and what it does and does not tell you:

• Mullvad and ipinfo: the two databases the Measured location comes from.
• Cloudflare: which Cloudflare data center answers through the tunnel. It is the same trace page you use below, but we keep only the data center, not the address or country.

Coming soon

Our own check for your address is coming to this page. Until then, the steps above use Cloudflare's.