How accurate is IP geolocation?

Trust the country, doubt the city, and never believe a street address: commercial IP geolocation is right about the country ~99.8% of the time, but places a US IP within 50 km of its true location only about 66% of the time (MaxMind, 2026) — and it cannot, even in principle, resolve to a household. Everything else in this guide is the detail behind that one sentence: why the errors happen, what the numbers mean for the location you're seeing right now, and when to override your skepticism in either direction.

Maintained by the ipconfig.io team · Reviewed 1 July 2026

See what geolocation says about you

Run the lookup on your own connection — the rest of the guide will make more sense against a concrete example:

curl ipconfig.io/json

The country, city, and latitude/longitude fields are the database's estimate for your IP (ipconfig.io uses MaxMind's GeoLite2). If the city is yours, you're in the lucky two-thirds. If it's a town an hour away — or your ISP's regional headquarters — you're looking at the normal failure mode, not a glitch.

How accurate is each level?

Level	Typical accuracy	Verdict
Country	~99.8% (MaxMind, 2026)	Reliable enough to treat as fact
Region / state	Good in large countries, weaker near borders	Usually right, occasionally off by one
City	~66% within 50 km for US IPs (MaxMind, 2026)	An estimate — often a nearby city or ISP hub
Coordinates	Center of the estimated area, not your position	Never a household; often a city centroid
Street address	Not possible from an IP	Anyone claiming this is wrong or guessing

The coordinates deserve the extra warning. They're the center of wherever the database thinks the block is — which has famously produced "IP mapped to my farm" stories when a country's default centroid landed on someone's property. A lat/long from an IP is a label for an area, not a pin on a person.

Why does my IP show the wrong city?

Geolocation databases map IP blocks, not devices. A block's location comes from where the ISP registered it, where it's routed, and measurement feedback — all of which describe the network's geography better than yours:

• ISP hubs. Blocks are often placed at the ISP's regional aggregation point, so a whole province can appear to live in one city.
• Mobile carriers. Phone traffic exits at the carrier's gateway; your IP geolocates to that gateway city, which may be hundreds of kilometers away.
• CGNAT. When your ISP shares one public IP across thousands of subscribers (what CGNAT is and how to tell), the location describes the pool, not any subscriber.
• Reassigned blocks. IP ranges move between regions when networks grow; databases lag the move by weeks or months.
• VPNs and proxies. The lookup is faithfully reporting the server's location — it just isn't your location. Verify what a site sees with curl ipconfig.io/country while connected.

If your block is genuinely mislocated, vendors accept corrections — MaxMind has a public data-correction form. Fixes are per-vendor and propagate slowly; a site using a different database won't see them.

When should you trust it?

Use IP geolocation for what the industry actually uses it for: choosing a language, showing regional prices, coarse fraud checks, complying with geo-licensing. At country granularity, it's dependable. The mistakes begin when city-level estimates get treated as facts — support agents "confirming" your address, or scare pages implying an IP reveals where you live. It doesn't; here's the honest list of what an IP does expose.

Frequently asked questions

How accurate is IP geolocation? Country ~99.8%; city only ~66% within 50 km for US IPs (MaxMind, 2026). Coordinates are area centroids, never a household.

Why does my IP show the wrong city? Databases map blocks by ISP registration and routing — regional hubs, mobile gateways, CGNAT pools and stale records all displace the estimate.

Can I fix my IP's location? Vendors accept corrections (MaxMind has a public form), but fixes are per-database and slow to propagate.

Does a VPN change my geolocation? Yes — sites see the VPN server's country and city, not yours.

Next steps

• Look up IP geolocation with curl — the per-field endpoints behind the lookup above.
• What is CGNAT? — the shared-IP setup that scrambles city accuracy for whole ISPs.
• What can someone do with your IP address? — the full, honest exposure list.