Receiving Monero & Addresses

Receiving Monero is as simple as sharing an address and waiting for the funds to arrive. But Monero gives you a few kinds of addresses, and choosing the right one makes you more private and better organized. In this lesson you will learn the difference between your primary address, subaddresses, and integrated addresses — and how Monero already protects your privacy automatically.

Your Primary Address

Every wallet has one primary address, a long string starting with the digit 4. It is built from your public spend and view keys and is completely safe to share — it cannot be used to spend your funds. To receive a payment, you give the sender this address (or a subaddress), and they send to it.

You will find it under the Receive tab of your wallet, usually shown as both text and a scannable QR code.

Privacy Is Built In

Here is something that surprises newcomers: even if you reused the same address for a hundred payments, an outside observer scanning the blockchain still could not link those payments together or see your balance. That is because every payment generates a unique one-time stealth address on the chain, so your real address never appears publicly. This is core Monero magic, explained fully in Stealth Addresses. Compare this with Bitcoin, where address reuse leaks your history — a contrast we draw in Monero vs Bitcoin Privacy.

So reusing your address is not a privacy disaster in Monero the way it is elsewhere. Even so, using subaddresses gives you extra organizational and privacy benefits.

Subaddresses

A subaddress is an additional receiving address generated by your wallet, all controlled by the same seed. You can create as many as you like at no cost, and they typically start with the digit 8. Funds sent to any of them appear in the same wallet balance.

Why use them?

• Organization — give a different subaddress to each person, service, or purpose, and track who paid what.
• Privacy — handing each sender a unique address means none of them can tell they are paying the same wallet, even by comparing notes.

A common habit is to generate a fresh subaddress for each new payment request. We go deeper, including how subaddresses group into accounts, in Subaddresses and Accounts.

Integrated Addresses

An integrated address is your address with a short payment ID baked in. The payment ID is a small tag that helps the receiver automatically match an incoming payment to a specific order or invoice — historically useful for merchants and exchanges handling many deposits to one address.

For most personal use today, subaddresses are the recommended approach because they achieve the same "which payment is which" goal without exposing a payment ID. You will mostly encounter integrated addresses when an exchange or service asks you to include a payment ID with your deposit — in that case, follow their instructions exactly.

How to Receive, Step by Step

1. Open the Receive tab and copy your primary address or generate a fresh subaddress.
2. Share the address (or its QR code) with the sender. You can also specify an amount to generate a payment request QR.
3. Wait for the transaction to appear, then for it to confirm.

Remember that received funds are locked for 10 blocks — roughly 20 minutes — before you can spend them. This is normal network behavior, not a problem, and is explained in Block Confirmations and Locks. Your wallet will show the incoming amount as "unconfirmed" or "locked" until then.

Good Habits When Receiving

• Always copy-paste or scan the address; never retype it by hand.
• For separate payers or purposes, hand out subaddresses.
• Only use an integrated address / payment ID when a service specifically requests one.
• Confirm the sender used the correct address before considering a payment complete.

Receiving Monero is genuinely easy, and the network does the hard privacy work for you automatically. Use subaddresses to stay organized and let stealth addresses keep you private. Now that funds can come in, let's learn how to send them back out in Sending Monero.