Time needed: 1 minute.

This short tutorial shows you 2 easy ways where to find the MAC address of a Raspberry Pi computer.

A Media Access Control (MAC) address is a unique identifier assigned to all devices able to connect to a network. This means that each Raspberry Pi has a unique MAC address. Sometimes you need this MAC address to add to the MAC whitelist of your router for example. If you need more information about network addresses, visit the ‘MAC address’ Wikipedia page.

Below you’ll find 2 very easy and quik methods to find out the MAC address of your Raspberry Pi.

Reboot without an SD-card to have the BIOS-screen visible : check the MAC address after the keyword ‘board’
If the firmware of your Pi is quite recent, you will see a BIOS-screen for a short while with some useful information while your Pi is starting up. To have the time to read the information, you can remove the SD-card before inserting the power plug.

At the end of ‘board’ line you’ll find the MAC address of your Raspberry Pi.

By the way, if the BIOS-screen doesn’t appear, your Pi has probably an older firmware version. Have a look at our tutorial ‘Raspberry Pi Firmware Update‘ if you don’t know how to update your firmware.
Open a terminal window and use the ‘ifconfig’ command : check the MAC address after the keyword ‘ether’
If for whatever reason you don’t have access to the BIOS screen as shown here above, there is another easy way to find the MAC address of your Raspberry Pi. Open a terminal window and enter following command :
ifconfig
Now look for ‘eth0‘ (for a wired connection) or ‘wlan0‘ (WiFi connection). As shown on the picture below, you’ll find your MAC address after the keyword ‘ether‘.