How to Find Your Wireless MAC Address

A MAC address contains 12 characters, with digits from 0 to 9, and letters from A to F. The letters may be either upper or lower case. Sometimes each pair of characters is separated by a colon, dash or a space. Sometimes there is no space at all. 

For an external wireless card, check the card to see if the MAC address is recorded on a label.

If your computer has an internal wireless card, you'll have to use the operating system to find the MAC address.

Windows XP

  1. Click on the Start Menu, then select the Run item.
  2. Type cmd in the text field.
  3. A terminal window will appear on the screen. Type ipconfig /all and return.
  4. There will be a block of information for each adapter on your computer. Look in the description field for wireless. The  Physical Address for that block is your wireless MAC address.

Mac OSX

  1. Click on the Apple Menu, and choose the Location menu item.
  2. Click on Network Preferences.
  3. Click on the Show menu and choose the AirPort item.
  4. The AirPort ID is your wireless MAC address.

Linux

  1. In a terminal window type ifconfig and return.
  2. You'll see a list of interfaces. Your wireless interface will likely be named wlan0 or wifi0. The wireless MAC address will be in the field labeled HWaddr.
  3. You can also use iwconfig to find your wireless MAC address if you have it installed.