What Is a Private IP Address?
Understand what qualifies as a private IP address, which ranges are reserved, and how private addresses are used in home and business networks.
Private IP Address Basics
A private IP address is an address from a range reserved for use on internal networks only. These addresses are not routable on the public internet and must be translated or proxied through a gateway before reaching external services.
The most commonly used private ranges are 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16 as defined by RFC 1918.
Where You See Private IP Addresses
Home routers assign private IP addresses to devices on your LAN, such as 192.168.1.100 or 10.0.0.25. Corporate networks use private addressing extensively to organize internal segments, labs, and data centers.
Cloud providers also allocate private IP ranges inside virtual networks, with gateways or load balancers handling translation to public-facing addresses where necessary.
Benefits and Limitations of Private IPs
Private addressing conserves scarce IPv4 space and provides a degree of isolation from the public internet. It allows organizations to design large internal addressing schemes without registering every network externally.
The main limitation is that private addresses cannot communicate directly with the public internet. Gateways using NAT or application proxies are required to bridge the gap between private and public networks.