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What a MAC lookup tells you about a device
Call it a MAC vendor lookup, an OUI lookup or a MAC manufacturer lookup, you get the same fields. Here is a VMware prefix, the kind you see on virtual machines.
- Manufacturer, with its website and logo
- Country the prefix is registered in
- Device type: phone, router, IP camera, printer, smart TV, IoT module, server card
- Interface: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth or cellular
- Block type (MA-L, MA-M, MA-S or CID), size and address range
- Virtual machine flag for VMware, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, KVM, Docker, Parallels and Xen
- Randomised address warning for iOS, Android and Windows
- Multicast, broadcast and locally administered bits
Open the full record
How complete each field is
Measured live across all 54,187 registered blocks. Registry fields come straight from IEEE. Company profiles and device types are added by hand, so the common vendors come first.
| Field | Filled | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor name | 100% | IEEE registry |
| Country | 100% | Registrant headquarters |
| Block type | 100% | MA-L, MA-M, MA-S or CID |
| Vendor website | 99% | Official domain |
| Company profile | 44% | Founded, industry, HQ |
| Device type | 24% | Curated per vendor |
What a MAC address can't tell you
It names the maker of the hardware. It says nothing about a person or a place.
Never in the result
- Where the device is
- The owner's name, address or phone number
- The IP address it uses on the internet
- The exact model: you get the maker, not the SKU
- A vendor for randomised addresses, which are generated, not registered
Why not
MAC addresses live at OSI Layer 2 and never leave the local network. Nobody can look one up "from the internet", and they carry no location at all.
If you want to know where a connection comes from, you need the IP address. The IP address lookup does that part.
How to look up a MAC address
Any common format works. We strip the separators and read the first six characters.
Paste the address into the box above and press enter. We take the first 6 hex characters as the OUI prefix, find it in our database and open the result in milliseconds.
00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E00-1A-2B-3C-4D-5E001A.2B3C.4D5E001A2B3C4D5E00:1A:2B001A2BTo search the other way, type a company name like Apple, Cisco or Samsung. You get every block registered to that company.
How a MAC address is built: OUI plus NIC
48 bits, split down the middle.
A MAC (Media Access Control) address is 48 bits, written as six pairs of hex digits, for example 00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E. The first three bytes are the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier), which the standards body assigns to one manufacturer. The last three are the NIC part, the serial the manufacturer gives each device it ships.
00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E breaks down: three OUI bytes (vendor prefix) and three NIC bytes (device-specific serial). Together they form a 48-bit hardware identifier.Blocks come in three sizes. MA-L is a 24-bit prefix with 16 million addresses. MA-M is 28 bits with about a million. MA-S is 36 bits with 4,096. Apple, Samsung and Intel each hold dozens of MA-L blocks, while a small hardware shop usually buys a single MA-S.
When a MAC lookup actually helps
The jobs it does every day.
A device you don't recognise
Your router lists a client you can't place. Look up its MAC and you know right away if it is a phone, a smart plug, a printer or something that shouldn't be there.
Security audits
Compare the MACs on your network with the devices you expect. Unknown vendors, randomised addresses and hypervisor prefixes deserve a closer look. DHCP logs, ARP tables and packet captures all carry MACs, so the vendor often tells you which physical box was involved.
IoT inventory
Dozens of sensors, cameras and switches on one network? Vendor and device type let you tag and group them without logging into each one.
Checking hardware you bought
Got a batch of network cards or modules from a reseller? Look up a few and confirm the real manufacturer. A mismatch can mean counterfeit or rebadged hardware.
Every block of one vendor
Need all prefixes of a manufacturer for asset tracking or an allow list? Type the company name in the box and you get every block the standards body assigned to it.
Network access control
Captive portals and 802.1X bypass for old devices that can't run a supplicant often fall back to filtering by vendor. Knowing the OUI lets you write the right rule.
Why your MAC address looks random now
Phones and laptops stopped showing their real address on Wi-Fi.
Since iOS 14, Android 10 and Windows 10 build 1903, the operating system makes up a new MAC each time it joins a Wi-Fi network. The real hardware address is still burned into the chip, it just isn't broadcast. That makes it much harder for advertisers and Wi-Fi analytics companies to follow a phone from shop to airport to conference hall.
Random MACs always have the locally administered bit set (bit 1 of the first byte). When it is on, no manufacturer assigned the address, so there is no vendor to find. We spot this and show a "randomised" flag instead of guessing a wrong vendor.
To see the real hardware MAC of a phone you have to switch the private address off. iPhone: Settings, Wi-Fi, (i) next to the network, Private Wi-Fi Address off. Android: Settings, Network, saved network, MAC type, Use device MAC.
How to find the MAC address on any device
Where it hides on each system.
Windows 10 and 11
Open Command Prompt or PowerShell and run ipconfig /all. Find your active adapter and read Physical Address, which looks like 00-1A-2B-3C-4D-5E. Or go to Settings, Network & Internet, Properties, Physical address (MAC).
macOS
Hold Option and click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar, the MAC is right there. Or open System Settings, Network, your connection, Details, Hardware. Ethernet shows its MAC on the same tab.
iPhone and iPad
The random per-network address is under Settings, Wi-Fi, (i) next to the network, Wi-Fi Address. The real one is under Settings, General, About, Wi-Fi Address, once Private Wi-Fi Address is off.
Android
On most phones: Settings, About phone, Status, Wi-Fi MAC address. Some skins put it under Settings, Connections, Wi-Fi, gear icon, Advanced. To switch randomisation, long-press the saved network and change MAC address type.
Linux
In a terminal run ip link show or ifconfig -a. Look for ether (modern iproute2) or HWaddr (old net-tools).
Router
Usually printed on a sticker underneath, and shown in the admin page under Status or WAN. The Wi-Fi MAC and the LAN MAC are normally different.
More about MAC addresses and OUIs
What people ask after their first lookup. Skim what is interesting, skip the rest.
Where the OUI prefix comes from
The standards body sells the blocks. A standard MA-L costs around $3,000 once and gives the buyer 16,777,216 addresses to use across its products forever. The smaller MA-S (4,096 addresses) is cheaper and meant for startups and small runs. Every registration is public.
Why the vendor differs from the brand on the box
Hardware gets rebranded all the time. A router sold as brand X often has a Wi-Fi chip whose MAC belongs to the chip maker: Qualcomm, MediaTek, Broadcom or Realtek. The OUI is registered to whoever made the silicon, not whoever printed the box.
What is a CID block?
CID means Company Identifier. It looks like an OUI but is used by protocols where the identifier stays private to the company and never appears as a real Ethernet MAC. We list them for completeness, they are not hardware addresses.
Locally vs universally administered
The second bit of the first byte says whether the standards body assigned the address through an OUI (universal) or someone set it by hand, in software or by randomisation (local). Every random MAC has this bit set, and so do the MACs hypervisors generate for new VMs.
Multicast vs unicast
The lowest bit of the first byte is 1 for multicast and 0 for unicast. Real network cards always use unicast. Multicast MACs belong to protocols like IGMP snooping and IPv6 neighbour discovery and never show up as a device's source address.
How VMware, Hyper-V and others pick MACs
Each hypervisor has its own prefix for the virtual cards it creates. VMware uses 00:50:56, 00:0C:29 and 00:05:69. Hyper-V uses 00:15:5D, VirtualBox 08:00:27, Parallels 00:1C:42 and Xen 00:16:3E. If you see one on a network where nobody runs virtual machines, find out why.
How many MAC addresses are there?
2^48, which is 281,474,976,710,656. Take away the multicast half and the locally administered ranges and you still have over 70 trillion addresses manufacturers can hand out. Running out is not a worry for many decades.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi often share a MAC
On most laptops and phones both radios sit on one combo chip. The Bluetooth MAC is usually the Wi-Fi MAC plus 1 or 2, and both resolve to the same chip maker.
When a MAC address changes
Three cases: Wi-Fi randomisation, which changes it per network or per connection; deliberate spoofing through system settings or tools like macchanger; and, rarely, a firmware update that rewrites it. Otherwise a hardware MAC stays the same for the life of the device.
Why a MAC can't track you across the internet
Routers drop the MAC when they pass traffic to another network, so each segment only sees the next hop. By the time a packet reaches a website, the only MAC on it belongs to the site's own border router. Yours never left your home network.
Two devices with the same MAC
On one network segment that confuses the switches: packets go to the wrong port, ARP tables flap and connections drop. Business switches detect the duplicate and shut the port. At home it usually shows up as random Wi-Fi drops.
MAC vendor lookup, MAC manufacturer lookup, OUI lookup
All the same thing: take a MAC, return who registered its prefix. You also see it called a MAC vendor decoder, MAC ID lookup, MAC address vendor lookup or OUI decoder. The answer doesn't change with the name.
Can I look up a MAC from a photo?
Not here directly. If you only have a picture, run it through any text recognition (your phone camera, Google Lens, macOS Live Text), copy the text and paste it into the box.
Questions we get a lot
What is a MAC address lookup?
What is the difference between MAC lookup and IP lookup?
Why does my MAC lookup show no vendor?
What MAC formats does the tool accept?
Can I find a device's location from its MAC?
How do I look up the MAC on my iPhone or Android?
Is the MAC address lookup tool free?
What is a reverse MAC lookup?
How often is the MAC vendor database updated?
Page last reviewed September 2026. Vendor database refreshed weekly.