Free Tool · Complete Guide

What is my location? My coordinates and current address, in two seconds

Tap the button below and the page shows your coordinates (latitude and longitude, ready to copy), the accuracy radius, the nearest street address to where you are, and a map pin — straight from your browser, without signing up or installing anything. Below the tool, the guide covers what the two numbers mean, how to read DD/DMS/UTM notation, how your device works out where you are, and what to do when the reading looks wrong.

What latitude and longitude actually are

Think of Earth as an orange covered in two sets of lines. The horizontal rings — running parallel to the equator — are lines of latitude. They tell you how far north or south you are. The vertical lines that run pole to pole are lines of longitude. They tell you how far east or west you are.

Latitude runs from 0° at the equator to 90° at the poles. The North Pole is +90° (latitude 90° N) and the South Pole is −90° (latitude 90° S). Longitude runs from 0° at the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, England, to 180° in either direction, meeting at the International Date Line in the Pacific. East is positive, west is negative.

Any pair of these two numbers identifies one and only one point on Earth's surface. The Eiffel Tower is at 48.8584, 2.2945. The Sydney Opera House is at −33.8568, 151.2153. The negative latitude tells you it's in the southern hemisphere; the longitude tells you it's east of Greenwich. For the deep history of why we measure from Greenwich at all, see the history of latitude and longitude.

From two numbers to a real address

Your phone always knows your location as two raw numbers. The first half of the work above is reading those numbers; the second half — the part most people actually care about — is turning 29.749907, -95.358421 into something like “Houston, Texas, United States” that you can paste into a delivery form or share with a friend.

That second step is called reverse geocoding. The page calls a free OpenStreetMap service that holds a global index of every road, building footprint, and administrative boundary, and asks it for the closest match to your coordinates. The match is usually a street name when you are outdoors with a clean GPS fix, and a neighborhood or city center when your reading is fuzzier. Either way, you see the same two numbers you started with — just dressed up as words. The reverse geocoding guide explains how that lookup works in more detail.

How to find your location on any device

The tool above does the same thing on every platform, but the permission flow differs. The goal in each case is to make sure the browser gets a fresh, precise reading rather than a stale or fuzzy one.

iPhone (Safari or Chrome)

1. Pull down Control Center and check that Location Services is enabled (the arrow icon).
2. If you have used the page before and it remembers an old permission, go to Safari → Settings → Privacy & Security → Location and reset it to Ask.
3. Tap the button, and when iOS asks, choose Allow Once with Precise: On.
4. Wait two or three seconds. The street address shows up under the accuracy radius once the lookup responds.

Android (Chrome)

1. Pull down the quick-settings panel and confirm Location is on.
2. In Chrome, tap the address bar lock icon → Permissions → Location → Allow if the site is remembered.
3. Tap the button. Android offers a precise/approximate choice — choose Precise.
4. The address line resolves as soon as the OS returns the GPS fix.

Desktop or laptop

1. Click the button. A permission prompt appears under the address bar.
2. Click Allow. Because most laptops have no GPS chip, the browser uses Wi-Fi positioning instead.
3. Expect the address to resolve to your neighborhood or city center rather than your exact street, with an accuracy radius of 10 to 50 meters.

If the permission prompt never appears, or the reading fails outright, the location troubleshooting checklist walks through the causes in order.

How to read each part of a coordinate

Every decimal-degree coordinate has the same shape: latitude, then longitude, separated by a comma. Latitude always comes first. This trips people up because mapping APIs disagree — Google Maps and most consumer apps use the (lat, lon) order, but GeoJSON and many GIS systems use (lon, lat). When in doubt, the larger of the two absolute values is usually longitude (since longitude goes up to 180 and latitude only to 90). The latitude vs longitude guide covers the memory tricks and edge cases.

The number of decimal places tells you how precise the coordinate is:

• 48.8 — ~11 km. Enough to identify a city.
• 48.86 — ~1.1 km. Enough to identify a neighborhood.
• 48.858 — ~110 m. Enough to identify a city block.
• 48.8584 — ~11 m. Enough to identify a building.
• 48.85842 — ~1.1 m. Enough to identify a parking space.
• 48.858420 — ~11 cm. More than consumer GPS can reliably deliver.

Five decimals (about 1.1 meters) is already finer than a phone can measure: most smartphone GPS chips are accurate to roughly 3–5 meters under ideal conditions. Six decimals (about 11 centimeters) is the standard storage format, which is why this tool and most apps show it, but treat the last digit as noise rather than real precision.

The three coordinate formats you'll see

Decimal degrees (DD) — the modern default

Example: 48.858420, 2.294500. Two decimal numbers, comma-separated. This is what every smartphone, GPS receiver, Google Maps URL, and modern API produces. It's the easiest to read, the easiest to paste, and the format the tool above defaults to.

Degrees, minutes, seconds (DMS) — the paper-map classic

Example: 48° 51' 30.3" N, 2° 17' 40.2" E. Each degree is divided into 60 minutes; each minute is divided into 60 seconds. Hemisphere letters (N/S, E/W) replace the ± sign. Older nautical charts, aviation maps, and most land-survey documents use DMS.

Converting between DD and DMS isn't hard. The integer part of the decimal degree is the degrees value. Multiply the remainder by 60 to get minutes (taking the integer part), and multiply that remainder by 60 to get seconds. For example, 48.8584° becomes 48° + (0.8584 × 60)' = 48° 51.504', then 48° 51' (0.504 × 60)" = 48° 51' 30.24". Our coordinates converter does this in one click if you would rather skip the arithmetic.

UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator)

Example: 31U 448262 5411917. UTM divides the world into 60 vertical zones, each treated as a flat plane, then expresses your position as “eastings” and “northings” in meters. It's preferred by hikers, search-and-rescue teams, and the military because distances on a UTM grid translate directly to real-world meters, so you can pace them out on the ground.

How a browser actually finds your coordinates

When you click “Allow” on a location prompt, the browser doesn't magically know where you are. It asks the operating system, which fuses several signals into a single best-guess coordinate:

• GNSS satellites. Your phone's GNSS chip (most laptops have none) listens for signals from GPS (US), Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China), and QZSS (Japan). With four or more satellites in view, it measures its distance to each and solves for a 3D position (trilateration). Read how GPS works for the satellite math.
• Wi-Fi BSSID lookup. Apple and Google maintain global databases of Wi-Fi access point MAC addresses paired to GPS coordinates collected from millions of phones. If your device can hear three or more known access points, your OS can infer your position to within ~25 meters even with no GPS signal at all.
• Cell-tower triangulation. On mobile, the carrier's knowledge of which tower you're connected to (and signal strength) provides a fallback when GPS is unavailable. Accuracy: a few hundred meters in cities, several kilometers in rural areas.
• IP geolocation. The slowest, least accurate fallback. Used when none of the above are available, or when the user denies precise location. IP location accuracy explained.

Why your location may be stale, not just wrong

A reading can be wrong in two very different ways: the GPS fix itself can be off, or the fix can be perfectly accurate but stale. The second case is easy to miss, because the page still reports a confident-looking address.

Browsers cache the last good fix and may hand it back instantly if the OS thinks nothing has changed. If you just got off a train or walked a few blocks, the cached reading can show you starting from where you were five minutes ago. The Find button on this page disables that cache explicitly — it sets maximumAge: 0 on the geolocation request — so every tap asks for a brand-new reading rather than a recycled one. If a result still looks stale, reload the tab and try again.

GPS drift is the other gotcha. When you are stationary indoors, the chip will quietly wander a few meters in random directions as it loses and regains satellites. The address rarely changes, but the dot on the map will jiggle. That is normal — the radius drawn around the pin shows where the device is 95% confident you actually are. If you need the position to update continuously as you move rather than one fix at a time, use the live location tracker, which streams readings through the watchPosition API.

When the address is precise — and when it is not

How specific the resolved address gets depends entirely on the accuracy of the underlying coordinate. A rough guide:

• Outdoors, phone, GPS: 3–5 m accuracy → exact street address, often the right building.
• Indoors, phone, Wi-Fi: 10–25 m → street name, possibly wrong house number.
• Laptop, Wi-Fi only: 25–100 m → neighborhood, sometimes the wrong street on a grid.
• Cell-tower fallback: a few hundred meters to several km → district or city center.
• IP geolocation only: 5–50 km → city or metropolitan area, never a street.

If you need the most exact address possible, step outside, give your phone fifteen seconds to lock onto satellites, and only then tap the button. Indoors, the resolution caps at the room you are sitting in. The GPS vs IP accuracy comparison has the measured numbers behind that table.

Practical uses for your coordinates

You almost certainly already use coordinates without thinking about them. A few uses where knowing how to read them by hand really pays off:

• Emergency calls. If a dispatcher can't find your address (no street sign, wrong house number, foreign country), six decimals of latitude and longitude give them an unambiguous fix. Our emergency-GPS guide covers the four-line script to say on the call.
• Sharing a place that has no address. A trailhead, a campsite, a fishing spot, the entrance to a cave. Coordinates beat written directions every time. To convert a coordinate back into a readable street address, the address finder handles both directions.
• Measuring distance between two points. The distance calculator uses the Haversine great-circle formula on a pair of coordinates.
• Geocaching. The world's biggest treasure hunt. Over three million caches are hidden globally, each identified only by coordinates.
• Verifying a VPN. Connect to a VPN claiming to be in another country, then open the IP Location tool to see what your IP looks like. Compare against the GPS reading above — if the IP places you elsewhere but GPS still shows your real city, the VPN's IP-side is working but GPS leaks your real location.
• Calibrating GPS-tagged photos. Cameras and phones embed GPS in EXIF metadata. Comparing the EXIF to a known-good reading on the same spot helps you spot a drifting GPS module.

Privacy: what the website actually sees

When you grant the Geolocation API permission, the website receives only the resulting latitude/longitude/accuracy — not which satellites your phone heard or which Wi-Fi access points helped. The tool above processes those numbers entirely in your browser. The only outgoing call the page makes is the reverse-geocoding lookup to OpenStreetMap Nominatim, and that request contains just the two numbers and no identifier — no name, no account, no fingerprint. We don't store your coordinates — see our Privacy Policy for the full breakdown of third parties involved.

If you want a deeper read on how the W3C Geolocation API decides what to share with a webpage, our browser geolocation guide walks through it line by line.

Related tools on this site

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Latitude vs longitude — the difference, explained
• How GPS works — the satellite math
• How to find your GPS coordinates
• 10 surprising things you can do with a GPS coordinate
• GPS coordinates in an emergency — how to send your location to 911 or 112
• Fix location not working — troubleshooting guide