If you want to find the MAC (hardware) address of your network card in Windows 11/10 or earlier versions of computers, here are the simple steps. You may require MAC (Media Access Control) address to troubleshoot the network issues or secure the network access by using the MAC address filter. For example, you can allow only specific MAC addresses on your home or office Wi-Fi network to access the internet.
Let me show you how to find the MAC address on the local and remote computer by using the command prompt. We can easily find someone’s computer (assuming it is on your network and reachable), printer or the router MAC address from command prompt.
MAC address is a hardware ID assigned by the network card manufacturer and it can’t be changed.
Though the following screenshots are taken from Windows 10, it is applicable for Windows 11 desktop and laptops too.
Find MAC Address by Command Prompt (Local Computer)
1) Open the command prompt in Windows 11/10.
Type ‘cmd’ in search and the open command prompt
2) Type ‘ipconfig /all’ and press enter.
3) It will be showing the details of all network adapters (including physical and virtual). Scroll down and find the correct network adapter which you are looking for, either it can physical LAN port or a Wireless adapter.
‘Physical Address’ of the particular network card is the MAC address of your computer. Whether you are using Windows 11, 10, 8.1 or even the Linux Operating system, the MAC address remains the same since it is an embedded hardware number of your computer network adapter.
It is the same and simple method to find MAC addresses in Windows Server Operating Systems such as Windows 2012 R2 and 2016.
Find MAC from GUI Control Panel
It is easy to identify the MAC address in Windows Operating System via the Graphical User Interface (GUI).
You can go to the network connections in the Control panel and double click to see the status of the network. It will bring the dialogue box as below which usually gives the information of connection status.
Click on the ‘Details’ button.
Here you can see some more information including the MAC address about the network card and connection status.
Finding the MAC Address of Remote Computers/Network Devices
If you want to find the physical address (MAC) of the remote computer or other network devices on your internal network, you can find it easily. You must know the IP address of the device or name (that should be resolved by DNS) to execute the simple commands in the Windows command prompt.
1) By using getmac /s command. This built-in Windows command can be used to retrieve the MAC address of the remote Windows computer. It uses RPC service to pull the details.
Type getmac /s <computer name or IP> from the command prompt.
We can’t use the getmac command to retrieve MAC address details for the network devices such as routers, wireless access points ..etc since they don’t use RPC service. Let’s use another method for these types of devices.
Ping and Arp Method
We can use the ping command to collect the hardware address details then arp command to retrieve them. Usually, every computer keeps the cache of all physical addresses (MAC) with the IPs of all network devices they communicate. So, once we did a ping to the desired remote Windows computer or network device, we can view the MAC address from the Arp cache.
2) Let’s ping a remote computer or network device from your computer in the command prompt. Here I’m pinging a network device (router).
Once it returned successfully, let us see the ARP cache entry for the particular device.
Type arp –a <IP Address>
Example: arp –a 192.168.1.1
That shows the MAC address of the IP address (192.168.1.1) which is the router in this example.
Note: This method will not work on external networks. For example, you can’t ping Google’s IP address then find its MAC address. When there is NAT enabled network active(which is enabled on the public network), this arp cache method will not work.
Anyhow, we hope these steps would be useful to find the MAC address of the Windows 11/10 computers and other Server Operating Systems internally and remotely. There would be more ways and tools available to find in bulk or track the MAC addresses on the network, but these simple commands with the Windows OS without installing any 3rd party tools would be handy at any time.
