What NAT Type Actually Controls

NAT type decides how easily other players can establish a direct connection to you. It does not change your ping. An Open NAT and a Strict NAT on the same line have identical latency, but Strict NAT causes long matchmaking queues, failed party chat, being placed in worse-fitting lobbies, and an inability to host. If your problem is slow connections rather than laggy ones, NAT is the right place to look. If your problem is high latency, NAT is a dead end.

What NAT Is, Briefly

Your home has one public IPv4 address and many devices. Network Address Translation is how your router shares that single address: it rewrites the source address and port of every outgoing packet, remembers the mapping in a table, and rewrites replies on the way back. This works flawlessly for anything you initiate, such as loading a web page. It is a problem for anything someone else initiates, because an unsolicited inbound packet arrives at your router with no matching table entry and gets discarded.

Multiplayer games need inbound connections more often than people assume. Voice chat, party systems, and any peer-to-peer session require two consoles behind two different routers to reach each other directly. Games solve this with NAT traversal, where both clients contact a matchmaking server and then attempt to punch a hole through their respective routers simultaneously. How well that works depends entirely on how predictable your router's port mapping behaviour is, which is what NAT type describes.

Open, Moderate, Strict and Type 1, 2, 3

PlayStation uses numbers, Xbox uses words, and PC games use their own labels, but they describe the same three tiers.

Xbox / PC	PlayStation	What It Means	Practical Effect
Open	Type 1	The device is directly reachable, or the router maps ports predictably and accepts return traffic freely	Connects to everyone, can host, fastest matchmaking, chat always works
Moderate	Type 2	Behind a normal NAT with reasonably predictable mappings	Fine most of the time; cannot always connect to other Moderate or Strict players, occasionally cannot host
Strict	Type 3	Behind a restrictive NAT, a double NAT, or carrier-grade NAT	Long queues, failed party chat, cannot host, sometimes cannot join friends at all

One nuance worth knowing: PlayStation Type 1 technically means the console is not behind a router at all, which usually implies it is directly on the modem. Most people with a well-configured router see Type 2, and Type 2 is a perfectly good result. Chasing Type 1 is not worth putting a console directly on the public internet.

What NAT Breaks, and What It Does Not

Being precise here saves a lot of wasted effort.

Breaks: hosting peer-to-peer matches, joining friends directly, party and voice chat, invite systems, and matchmaking speed. In peer-hosted titles a Strict NAT can also push you into distant lobbies simply because they are the only ones you can connect to, which then does raise your effective ping as a side effect.
Does not break: latency to dedicated servers, download speeds, packet loss, or jitter. If a game runs on publisher-hosted dedicated servers and you connect fine, your NAT type is not why the game feels laggy. That is a different investigation, covered in What Causes High Ping.

CGNAT: The One You Cannot Port Forward Around

Carrier-grade NAT is your ISP doing to you what your router does to your devices. IPv4 addresses ran out years ago, so many providers now place hundreds or thousands of customers behind one shared public address. You still get an address on your router's WAN interface, but it is a private one, and the real translation happens in the ISP's equipment where you have no control.

Under CGNAT, port forwarding on your own router accomplishes nothing. You can forward a port perfectly and the traffic still never reaches you, because it stops at the carrier's NAT first. This is the single most common reason people spend an evening configuring a router and see zero change in NAT type. Signs you are behind CGNAT: your router's WAN address falls in a private or shared-address range rather than being a normal public address, it does not match the public address a website reports back to you, and no forwarded port ever tests as open.

CGNAT is most common on mobile broadband, fixed wireless, and newer or budget fibre plans. It is least common on established cable and DSL providers. If you are shopping for a connection specifically for gaming, ask about it before you sign, as covered in how to choose an ISP for gaming.

Double NAT: Two Routers, One Problem

Double NAT happens when translation occurs twice inside your own home, almost always because your ISP supplied a combined modem-router and you added your own router behind it. Each device runs its own NAT, so the inner router forwards a port to your console and the outer one still drops the traffic before it gets there.

You have three clean options. Put the ISP device into bridge or modem-only mode so it passes the public address straight to your router, which is the correct fix when available. Alternatively, disable the ISP device's routing and Wi-Fi and use it purely as a modem. Failing both, forward the same port range on the outer device to your inner router's WAN address, then again from the inner router to the console. Many consoles and routers detect this state explicitly and report it in their network test results.

How to Open Your NAT, in Order

Confirm you are not behind CGNAT. Compare the WAN address shown in your router's status page against the public address reported by any what-is-my-IP site. If they differ, stop. No local configuration will fix this and you need to contact your ISP.
Eliminate double NAT. Count the routers between your console and the internet. Bridge the ISP device if there is more than one.
Enable UPnP on exactly one router. This lets the console request its own port mappings automatically and resolves the majority of Strict NAT cases in a single step. Enabling it on two chained routers causes conflicts rather than fixing them.
Give the console a fixed local address. Use a DHCP reservation in your router rather than setting a static address on the console, so the reservation survives reboots and cannot collide with the DHCP pool.
Forward ports manually only if UPnP fails. Get the port list from the game publisher's own support page, never from a forum post, since these change between titles and patches.
Re-run the console's built-in connection test. Both major consoles report NAT type directly in their network settings, and that result is more authoritative than any third-party checker.

Console-specific network settings, including where each platform reports NAT type, are covered in How to Reduce Lag on PS5 and Xbox.

Asking Your ISP for a Public Address

If you are behind CGNAT, the fix has to come from the provider. Two things are worth requesting.

A public IPv4 address is the direct solution. Many ISPs will move you off CGNAT on request at no charge, some charge a small monthly fee, and some only offer it on business plans. Ask specifically for a public, non-shared IPv4 address and mention that carrier NAT is preventing inbound connections. Avoid the word gaming, which invites a scripted response about speed upgrades; the word you want is inbound.

Native IPv6 is the other answer, and increasingly the better one. IPv6 has enough address space that every device gets its own globally routable address, so there is no translation and no NAT type problem at all. Modern consoles and many games support it. Enable IPv6 on your router if your ISP provides it, and confirm your firewall is still doing its job, because a globally routable address means the firewall, not NAT, is what keeps unsolicited traffic out. Router feature checklists including IPv6 support are in our gaming router guide.

After You Open It, Verify the Rest

An Open or Moderate NAT means connections establish cleanly. It says nothing about how good those connections are once established. Once matchmaking is behaving, check latency and jitter separately with a browser ping and jitter test, keeping in mind it measures HTTPS round-trips to nearby cloud endpoints as a real-world proxy rather than in-game packets. If matchmaking is now fast but matches still feel bad, you have moved on to a latency problem, and NAT is no longer the thing to tune.