Find the manufacturer behind a MAC from its OUI, and flag randomized MACs.
This MAC address vendor lookup turns a MAC into the manufacturer that built it. The first three bytes are the OUI, a block the IEEE assigns to one maker, and the tool matches that against the major vendors: networking gear, computers, phones, the big IoT and camera brands. Paste a full address in any format (colons, dashes, Cisco dotted) or just the OUI. It also reads the first byte's flags, so it tells you straight away when an address is multicast, or locally administered, which is the giveaway of a randomized privacy MAC that no vendor can be read from. Everything runs in your browser, so pasting a real device MAC is fine; nothing is sent anywhere.
100% in your browser. Nothing you type ever leaves this page.
- Normalized
- 10:00:20:AA:BB:CC
- OUI (no separators)
- 100020
- First byte
- 0x10 (00010000)
- Cast
- Unicast
- Administration
- Globally unique (OUI)
- Address type
- Real hardware MAC
What the OUI actually tells you
A MAC address is six bytes, and it splits cleanly down the middle. The first three are the OUI, a block the IEEE hands to one manufacturer. The last three are that manufacturer's own counter for the individual network interface. So a lookup answers exactly one question: who made the chip. Not the model. Not the owner. Paste a full address or just the first three bytes, only the OUI gets read either way.
The three-byte assumption is where it gets messier than most lookups admit. A 24 bit block, called MA-L, is only one of the sizes the IEEE sells. There’s also MA-M at 28 bits and MA-S at 36 bits, carved out for companies that will never ship 16 million devices. When a small vendor buys an MA-S block, the first three bytes belong to the registry operator rather than to them, so every tool on the internet reports the same wholesaler for dozens of unrelated products. That’s not a bug in the lookup. It’s the registry working as designed, and it’s why an answer sometimes feels vaguely wrong.
The other reason the name looks off: you get the company that made the silicon, which is frequently not the brand printed on the case. Consumer routers and smart plugs are mostly built by a handful of contract manufacturers. Seeing an unfamiliar Shenzhen name under a familiar logo is normal.
Finding the address in the first place
Half the people who need a vendor lookup are actually stuck one step earlier, so here’s that step.
getmac /v /fo list
ifconfig en0 | grep ether
ip link show
On a phone, it’s in the settings rather than a shell. Android puts it under About phone, then Status. iOS shows it as Wi-Fi Address under General, About. Be aware that both will hand you a randomized address unless you’ve turned that off for the network you’re on, which brings us to the next part.
For devices that aren’t in front of you, arp -a lists every MAC your machine has recently talked to on the local segment. That’s the fastest way to put a name to the unknown thing on your LAN, and it works the same on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Why half your devices say "locally administered"
Open a DHCP lease table on a busy network and a chunk of it looks like nonsense with no vendor attached. That’s privacy working as intended, not a broken database.
Phones randomize their MAC per network now, and a randomized address flips the locally administered bit, the second least significant bit of the first byte. This tool reads that bit and says so plainly, because hunting a manufacturer for a randomized address wastes an afternoon. The same bit shows up on virtual machines and on any address an administrator set by hand, so it’s a useful signal well beyond phones. Worth knowing if you plan network access control around MAC addresses: they were never an identity, and since roughly 2020 they’re not even stable.
The neighbouring bit, the least significant one of the same byte, marks a group address. If it’s set you’re looking at multicast or broadcast traffic rather than a device, and there’s no vendor to find at all.
Frequently asked questions
How do I look up the vendor of a MAC address?
Paste the address above. Any format works, whether it uses colons, hyphens, dots or nothing at all, and the first three bytes are enough on their own. The lookup runs against a filtered copy of the IEEE registry inside your browser, so nothing you type is sent anywhere. If the OUI is registered but not in our set, you get an honest "not found" rather than a confident guess.
Why does the vendor name not match the brand on the device?
Because the OUI belongs to whoever made the network chip or assembled the board, and consumer hardware is overwhelmingly built by contract manufacturers. A camera sold under one logo can carry silicon from a company you’ve never heard of. There’s also the block size issue: vendors who bought a small MA-M or MA-S allocation share their first three bytes with the registry operator, so the name you get back is the wholesaler rather than the maker.
What does "locally administered" mean here?
It means the address wasn’t assigned by a manufacturer, so no OUI lookup can succeed. The second least significant bit of the first byte is the flag. Randomized phone MACs set it, and so does any address an administrator configured by hand. It’s the expected answer for most modern phones on a network they don’t trust.
Can I find the owner or location of a device from its MAC?
No, and anything claiming otherwise is selling something. A MAC address identifies a network interface to the local segment and nothing more. It doesn’t leave your local network, and it was never tied to a person. The manufacturer is genuinely all there is to learn from it.
Does this send my MAC address to a server?
It doesn’t. The vendor table ships with the page and the match happens in your browser, which is also why the response is instant and works with the network unplugged. That matters more than it sounds: MAC addresses from a corporate network are exactly the sort of thing that should not be pasted into a remote form.