IP Location Wrong?
see what the registry actually says about your address
When your IP address shows the wrong location, every database involved started from the same public registry record — and then guessed the rest. This shows you that record for your own address: which country it is registered in, who holds it, how many addresses share it, and whether your provider has published anything more precise. That record is almost always where the wrong answer began.
Check why your IP location is wrong
Your own address is already filled in. Change it to check any other public IPv4 or IPv6 address.
The address being checked
216.73.216.105
Taken from your connection
Registered country
—
Not looked up yet
Addresses sharing this record
—
Not looked up yet
Quick Answer: my IP location is wrong — why?
Because no database is reading your location — they are all estimating it from one public registry record, and that record describes a block of addresses, not a person. If that block covers a whole region, there was never enough detail in it to place you. The check above shows your own record: the country it is registered in, how many addresses share it, and whether your provider published anything more precise. Country is usually right; the city is the guess.
Sarah Thompson
Network Intelligence Analyst
Sarah works on IP lookup, geolocation, WHOIS and ASN data — specifically on how reliable that data is, rather than on the data itself.
This tool was built after measuring what the registry actually contains rather than assuming it. Twenty-six consumer broadband and mobile addresses across four regional registries were checked while designing it: the registered country was correct for every one of them, the registered block ranged from 256 to 4,718,592 addresses, and not one provider published a geofeed. Two planned features were dropped because that measurement showed they would be blank for almost every visitor. What the page shows is what was there.
Last reviewed 30 September 2026 · Published 30 September 2026
View all articles by Sarah ThompsonReading your result: registry facts, not a guess
Everything in the table above comes from one place — the regional internet registry that issued your address. That record is public, it is authoritative about who holds the address, and it is the seed every commercial geolocation database starts from. What it is not is a statement about where you are sitting.
This is the distinction that makes a wrong location make sense. A geolocation lookup answers "where do we estimate this range serves?" The registry answers "who was this range issued to, and in which country?" The first is an inference. The second is a fact. When the two disagree, the second is the one to trust, and it tells you which kind of problem you have.
| Field | Where it comes from | Why it decides your next step |
|---|---|---|
| Registered country | The registry record for the block containing your address | The single most reliable field there is. If this is right and the city is wrong, it is a vendor problem. If this is wrong, it is a registry problem, and no vendor correction will hold |
| Holder | The organisation the block is issued to | Usually your provider, sometimes a parent company or an address-leasing business. A name you do not recognise is itself informative |
| Registered range | The exact start and end addresses of the record | Its size is the ceiling on how precise any estimate can ever be |
| Allocation type | The registry's own status word for the record | Separates a block assigned to one customer from one allocated to a provider to hand out across a region |
| Registry address | The postal address on the holder's contact record | A head office. Read the section below before you draw any conclusion from it |
| Reverse DNS | A PTR lookup on the address | Names the provider and often the connection type. It is not a location, and this page does not treat it as one |
| Geofeed | A file the operator publishes themselves, per RFC 9632 | The only mechanism that corrects every vendor at once. Almost no consumer provider publishes one |
What this page deliberately does not show: a guess at your city. That is what a geolocation database does, and the site's IP geolocation lookup already does it. Putting a second guess next to the first would add nothing. This page shows the evidence underneath the guess instead. If the underlying idea of what an address is and is not is new to you, the guide to what an IP address actually is is the place to start.
The only address on the record is a head office — and that is the whole problem
When a provider registers a block of addresses, they supply a contact address. That address is their corporate headquarters. It is the only postal address anywhere in the public record for your connection, and it is very often on the other side of the country.
Here is a real example, from a range checked while this tool was being built. A residential connection in California. The registry's own name for the block contains BAYAREA. The reverse DNS on the line ends in .ca.comcast.net. Both point at California. And the postal address on the record reads:
1800 Bishops Gate Blvd
Mt Laurel, NJ 08054
United StatesAdvertisement
New Jersey. Roughly four thousand kilometres from the customer. Nothing here is a mistake — that genuinely is the right contact address for the company. It is simply not a location for the connection, and anything that treats it as one will place that customer on the wrong coast.
The same check turned up a second kind of staleness: a block whose registry name says one provider while its contact records still resolve to the company that owned it before an acquisition. Registry records are updated when ownership changes require it, not when a customer moves house.
So treat that line for what it is. The tool labels it as the holder's registered head office and nothing more. It is worth seeing because it explains so much: when the only address in the official record is a head office, every database building on that record has to invent the rest. If you want to read the raw registration entry yourself, the WHOIS lookup shows it unprocessed.
One record, millions of addresses
This is the number most people have never been shown, and it settles the question on its own. Your address is not registered individually. It sits inside a block, and that block is registered as one record with one country and one contact.
Across twenty-six consumer broadband and mobile addresses checked while building this tool, the registered block ranged from 256 addresses to 4,718,592 addresses — a spread of more than eighteen thousand times. One European provider holds a single record covering over four and a half million addresses for an entire country. A cable provider in North America had one covering 256.
| If your record covers | What that means for any estimate | Is a correction worth filing? |
|---|---|---|
| Over a million addresses | The record describes a national or regional footprint. No vendor can place you from it; they are using other signals entirely | Rarely worth it. The address is likely reassigned often, and a correction would cover millions of unrelated people |
| Tens of thousands | A provider's pool for a large area. The estimate is a centre of mass, not your town | Sometimes, if the address is static |
| A few thousand or fewer | Narrow enough that a correction describes something real | Yes. This is the case where filing genuinely works |
There is a second thing worth knowing about the range. Registries do not always issue blocks on neat boundaries, so a record often cannot be written as a single prefix at all. Where that is the case the tool says so rather than inventing a tidy figure — one real German range runs from 79.192.0.0 to 79.244.191.255, which is 3,457,024 addresses and is not any prefix. To see which network actually announces your block to the rest of the internet, the ASN lookup reports the autonomous system and its operator.
Wrong country and wrong city are not the same problem
People report both as my IP address shows the wrong location, and the two get treated as one complaint. They are not the same thing at all. Country is the field these systems are genuinely good at, and it is also the field the registry itself states. Across the twenty-six consumer addresses checked here, the registered country matched the provider's real country every single time — twenty-six out of twenty-six, with seventeen of them independently corroborated by the reverse DNS domain.
So the two cases split cleanly:
- Registered country right, city wrong. Ordinary. The registry never claimed to know your city; a vendor estimated it and got it wrong. This is the case where a correction form is the right move.
- Registered country wrong. Unusual, and it means the address genuinely is not yours in the way you assume. Something is carrying your traffic out through another country — a VPN, a corporate tunnel, a privacy relay such as iCloud Private Relay, or a provider routing through a neighbouring country. No vendor correction will fix this, because they are all reading the same registry and the registry is describing a foreign block.
If the country is wrong and you are not knowingly on a tunnel, the proxy and VPN detector will tell you whether the address you are on is being seen as one. And for the wider question of why an address ends up describing somewhere you have never been — carrier NAT, recycled ranges, stale databases, IPv6 — the companion guide to why your IP shows a different city than where you live goes through every cause in order. This page is the diagnosis; that one is the explanation.
How to get it corrected, in the order that works
If the check above shows your IP address location is incorrect at city level while the country is right, this is the section you want. There is no switch to flip. Every route below is a request to somebody else, and they vary in whether they will even accept one from you. These were checked directly on each company's own page.
| Who | Will they take a request from you? | What they say about it |
|---|---|---|
| MaxMind | Yes — explicitly offers a "One-time location correction for your personal or home IP address" | One-off corrections are "typically reviewed within 1-2 business days", and accepted ones go into the next database release |
| DB-IP | The form is open; it states no eligibility rule either way | Asks for the address, the location, the ISP and what is wrong. No turnaround stated |
| IPinfo | Form available; no eligibility rule stated | Accepts one-time corrections and geofeeds. No turnaround stated |
| ipregistry | Yes — corrections come "from trusted sources and you!" | Asks you to "include as much information as possible", and says it does "not guarantee acceptance of all corrections" |
| Digital Element | No. "We only accept requests from IP address owners/delegates, and cannot process submissions from end users." | Also declines free email domains. Your provider has to do it |
| Has a "Report IP problems" route; sign-in required | "Updates to IP addresses may take more than a month." And: "We won't follow up with you individually." |
Which one do you file with?
All of them, and the honest reason is uncomfortable: no major service publishes which geolocation provider it uses. That was checked for Google, Netflix, Steam, streaming platforms, banks and the large ad networks, and none of them state it. Nor does any vendor publish a customer list naming those services. So there is no way to look up "which form fixes Netflix". Pages that imply otherwise are guessing.
Send evidence, not an assertion. Include the address or range, the correct city and country, and something that shows the range serves there — a business address on the same connection, an invoice from the provider, or a support ticket confirming the service address. Corrections without evidence tend to be declined, which is reasonable given anyone could file one.
The route that fixes everyone at once
If you hold the address block yourself — a business with its own range, or an operator — there is a mechanism that beats every form on this page. Publish a geofeed: a plain CSV stating what your ranges actually serve, in the format set out in RFC 8805, linked from your registry record the way RFC 9632 describes. RFC 9632 is specific about it: the reference "MUST be followed by a single URL", and "The geofeed files MUST be published via and fetched using HTTPS." MaxMind, IPinfo, ipregistry and Digital Element all state that they consume them.
The tool above checks whether the holder of your address has published one. If the answer is no, that is not a gap in the tool — it is the reason the guessing is happening, and it is worth putting to your provider in exactly those words.
What cannot be fixed, and what to do instead
Some of the reasons an IP address keeps showing the wrong location cannot be corrected at all — not by you, and not by the companies publishing the guess. Being clear about those edges is more useful than implying there are none.
| Situation | Why a correction will not hold |
|---|---|
| Your address changes regularly | MaxMind warns about this on its own form: "If you are attempting to correct your own IP address, it may be frequently reallocated or shared with other people who are spread out over a large geographic area." Correcting today's address does nothing for tomorrow's |
| You are behind a carrier gateway | The public address belongs to the carrier and is shared by many subscribers across a wide area. There is no correct single location to file |
| A VPN or privacy relay is on | The address is the exit server's and reporting its location is the service working as intended |
| The registered country is wrong | Every vendor reads the same registry. The holder has to fix the record; a vendor form cannot override it |
| One site is wrong and everything else is right | That site has its own data or its own cache. Set your location manually there — most services allow it — rather than chasing the vendors |
And one piece of reassurance that belongs here, because it is the reason many people are reading at all. A wrong city on a lookup is not evidence that anyone has accessed your connection, and the address does not expose where you live. The separate guide to whether an IP address can lead someone to your home answers that properly.
If the fastest possible fix is what you want: let the site ask your browser for your location instead of guessing from your address. That replaces a regional estimate with the device's own positioning. The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly — you are handing over something far more precise than the address was ever revealing.
Frequently asked questions about a wrong IP location
My IP address location is wrong — can I change it myself?
Not directly. You cannot edit the location attached to your address, because you do not control the record it comes from. What you can do is ask the companies that publish the guess to correct it. MaxMind accepts corrections from ordinary people and says one-off requests are "typically reviewed within 1-2 business days". Others accept them too, and one — Digital Element — refuses end users outright. The tool above shows which situation you are in.
Why is my IP address location wrong on my phone but right on Wi-Fi?
Because they are two different addresses on two different networks. A phone on mobile data usually reaches the internet through a regional carrier gateway shared by thousands of subscribers, so the address you get belongs to that gateway rather than to your area. Run the check on both and compare the registered organisation and the size of the block: the mobile one is almost always registered as part of a much larger range.
My IP address location is wrong country — is that different?
Yes, and it matters more. Country is the one thing these databases are reliably good at, so a wrong country usually means something is genuinely routing your traffic elsewhere — a VPN, a corporate tunnel, or a privacy relay such as iCloud Private Relay. Check the registered country in the result above: if the registry also says a country you have never been to, the address itself is foreign to you, not just the guess about it.
How do I fix my IP address location?
In this order. First confirm what the registry says, using the tool above. If the registered country is correct and only the city is wrong, that is a vendor problem — file a correction with MaxMind and the others listed on this page. If the registered country is wrong, no vendor correction will hold, because they all read the same registry; that has to be fixed by whoever holds the address. And if a single site is wrong, fix it at that site: most let you set your location manually.
Why is my IP address wrong when I have not changed anything?
Addresses move. Providers reassign blocks between regions as demand shifts, and a range serving one area last month can serve another this month. The databases only learn about it when they next re-estimate, so they keep reporting the old answer confidently until then. The registered block in the result above is what the vendors are working from — if it covers a whole country, there was never enough detail in it to place you accurately in the first place.
Does my IP address change with my location?
Only if the network changes. Your address comes from whichever network you are connected to, so moving between home Wi-Fi, a mobile network and a coffee shop gives you three different addresses, each registered to a different organisation. Moving house with the same provider often does not change how your address is registered, which is one reason a recently moved household can keep showing the old town for months.
Does the reverse DNS name tell you where I am?
Almost never, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Reverse DNS is the label your provider attached to the line, and while backbone routers often carry city or airport codes, ordinary customer lines do not. Across 39 consumer addresses checked while building this tool, none carried a city name or airport code a general parser could read. It is shown because it identifies the provider, not the place.
What is a geofeed, and why does mine say nothing was published?
A geofeed is a file an operator publishes to state, in their own words, where their address ranges actually serve — the format is RFC 8805 and the way to find it is RFC 9632. It is the one mechanism that corrects every vendor at once. Most consumer providers publish none: of 26 consumer ISP addresses checked while building this tool, none had one. That silence is the answer to your question — the databases are guessing because nobody told them.
Related address and location tools
This page reads the registry. These read the estimate, the routing and the reputation built on top of it.
Now compare it with the guess everyone else is reading.
You have seen the registry record. The geolocation lookup shows what the commercial databases have built on top of it — and the gap between the two is the answer to your question.
Last updated 30 September 2026 · Registry data from the regional internet registries, read live