Monero Subaddresses: What They Are and How to Use Them

The three kinds of Monero addresses

Every Monero wallet has one primary address, which starts with the digit 4. From that wallet you can also generate subaddresses, which start with the digit 8, and integrated addresses, which combine your primary address with a payment ID.

All of these point back to the same wallet and the same funds. The difference is in how you organize and reveal them. Subaddresses are the modern, recommended way to receive multiple payments, and they have largely replaced the older integrated-address-plus-payment-ID approach for most uses.

How subaddresses actually work

Your wallet is built from a seed, which produces a master spend key and view key. A subaddress is derived from those master keys using an index, organized into accounts and addresses within each account. You can generate a practically unlimited number of them, all controlled by your single seed.

When someone sends to a subaddress, your wallet recognizes the incoming output as yours during scanning, because it checks each output against your keys and the derived subaddress range. You never have to import or register a subaddress anywhere. Generate it, share it, and the wallet handles the rest.

Why subaddresses improve your privacy

Monero already hides amounts, senders, and receivers on the blockchain, so an outside observer cannot tie addresses together by watching the chain. The privacy benefit of subaddresses is about the people you interact with directly.

If you reuse one address across many people, each of them sees the same string. They could compare notes and learn that the same address received from several of them. By giving each payer a unique subaddress, no one you deal with sees an address you have shared with anyone else. It compartmentalizes who knows what, off-chain.

Organizing payments with accounts

Subaddresses sit inside accounts. Account 0 is your default, and you can create additional accounts for separate purposes, such as one for personal use and another for a side project. Each account has its own running balance and its own set of subaddresses.

This gives you a lightweight bookkeeping system inside one wallet. You can label each subaddress in the GUI so you remember who or what it was for. The labels are local to your wallet and never leave your device, so they do not affect privacy on the network.

When to use a subaddress versus an integrated address

For almost everyone, the answer is just use subaddresses. Generate a new one per payer or per invoice and you get clean separation with no extra steps. They are supported across the official GUI, CLI, and the major third-party wallets.

Integrated addresses bundle a payment ID into the address and were historically used by services to match incoming payments to orders. They still work, but subaddresses solved the same problem more cleanly, so the ecosystem has shifted toward them. If you are not running a payment processor that specifically asks for an integrated address, you can ignore them.

How to generate and use one

In the Monero GUI, open the Receive tab. You will see your current address and a button to create a new subaddress, often with a field to add a label. Click it, copy the new 8-prefixed address, and share that for the payment you are expecting.

In the CLI, the address command lists your subaddresses and lets you create new ones with an optional label. Mobile wallets expose the same feature under their receive screens. There is no downside to spinning up a new one for each incoming payment, and it costs nothing.

When you receive into Monero from a swap, you can paste a fresh subaddress as your destination so that the payout lands on an address you have not shared elsewhere. Because the swap is non-custodial and needs no account, the only thing it ever sees is that one receiving address.

A few practical cautions

Subaddresses are not a substitute for good operational habits. They protect you from the people you share addresses with, not from someone who already knows your identity and is watching your behavior off-chain.

Also remember that all subaddresses share one seed. Backing up that single seed backs up every subaddress and account you will ever create, so there is nothing extra to save. Lose the seed and you lose all of them at once, which is the same rule that applies to any Monero wallet.