MAC Address Formatter — colon, hyphen, Cisco
Reformat a MAC address into colon, hyphen, Cisco dot and bare forms in upper or lower case.
🔒 Runs entirely in your browser. Your input and output are never sent to a server or stored — fully private.
Click any value to copy. Accepts colon, hyphen, dot (Cisco) or no separator.
About this tool
This MAC address formatter rewrites a hardware (MAC) address into every common style — colon-separated (00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E), hyphen-separated, Cisco dotted (001a.2b3c.4d5e) and bare with no separators — in either upper or lower case. Paste an address in any format and copy it in the exact form your switch, script or documentation expects, all in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
What are the different MAC address formats?
The same six bytes can be written several ways: colon-separated (00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E) and hyphen-separated (00-1A-2B-3C-4D-5E) are the most common, Cisco equipment uses three dot-separated groups (001a.2b3c.4d5e), and some tools want the twelve hex digits with no separators at all.
Does reformatting change the address?
No. Only the separators and the letter case change; the twelve hexadecimal digits — and therefore the actual hardware address — stay exactly the same, so every format identifies the very same network interface.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. Reformatting is a text operation that runs entirely in your browser, so the MAC addresses you paste are never sent to or stored on a server.
How can I tell a real vendor address from a locally administered one?
Look at the second-lowest bit of the first octet. If it is set, the address is locally administered — assigned by software rather than burned in by a manufacturer — and the first three octets are not a real OUI, so vendor lookup will find nothing. In practice that means the second hex digit is 2, 6, A or E: 02:1A:… is locally administered, 00:1A:… is not. The lowest bit of the same octet marks multicast, which is why broadcast is FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF.
Why does my phone show a different MAC on every network?
Because iOS and Android now use a randomised, per-network address by default to stop venues tracking a device as it moves between Wi-Fi networks. Those addresses are locally administered, so they will not resolve to a vendor. This breaks anything that relies on a stable MAC — DHCP reservations, MAC filtering and captive-portal allow-lists — and the fix is to turn off private address for that specific network on the device, not to fight it at the access point.