What IP68 and IP48 tell you about water and dust

IP codes come from IEC 60529, an international standard for how enclosures resist solid objects and liquids. Two digits follow the letters. The first is dust, the second is water, and they are independent — a high score on one says nothing about the other.

Reading the digits

The dust digit runs from 0 to 6. A 4 means protection against solid objects larger than one millimetre. A 5 means limited dust ingress that does not interfere with operation. A 6 means dust-tight.

The water digit runs from 0 to 9. A 7 means immersion to one metre for thirty minutes. An 8 means immersion beyond one metre under conditions the manufacturer defines — which is why IP68 is not a single standard but a family of manufacturer-specific claims, and why you should read the footnote. A 9 covers high-pressure, high-temperature spray.

IP68 on a slab flagship

IP68 is the standard rating for a modern flagship: dust-tight, and immersion under the maker's stated conditions, often 1.5 metres for thirty minutes. Most manufacturers publish the exact depth and duration in a footnote, and they differ.

What it genuinely covers is rain, spills, a dropped phone in a sink, and a bathroom with a running shower. That is not a small thing — liquid used to destroy phones routinely, and it now mostly does not.

IP48 on a foldable

Some foldables, including the Motorola Razr in our catalog, carry IP48. The water digit is the same 8 as a flagship slab. The dust digit is 4 rather than 6, and that gap is the whole story.

A folding phone has a hinge, and a hinge is an opening. Sealing a mechanism that moves thousands of times against fine particles is a genuinely hard engineering problem, and the industry has not fully solved it. Grit working into a hinge or under the edge of an inner display is a documented failure mode.

The practical translation: a foldable rated IP48 handles rain about as well as a flagship slab, and handles a beach, a building site, or a pocket full of sand considerably worse. If you spend time in dusty environments, that is a real argument against the form factor rather than a footnote.

IP69 and what it adds

IP69 covers high-pressure hot-water jets — a test designed for industrial equipment that gets steam-cleaned. Some phones, including the OnePlus 13 and Oppo Find X8 Pro in our catalog, now list IP68 and IP69 together.

It is a real test result and it is more protection than IP68 alone. It is not a licence to put the phone through a dishwasher, and it does not extend the depth or duration of safe immersion.

What no IP rating covers

This is the part that catches people out. IP tests use fresh water. Salt water is corrosive and is outside every one of these tests — a phone rinsed in the sea and left to dry can fail weeks later from corrosion inside the connector. Soaps, chlorine, shampoo, and alcohol wipes are outside them too, as are hot water and steam for any rating below 9.

Pressure matters more than depth. Water moving past a phone — a swimming stroke, a shower jet, a waterfall — exerts far more force on a seal than still water at the same depth, and the tests use still water.

And ratings describe a new device. Seals age, adhesive weakens with heat, and a phone that has been dropped or opened for a screen repair has an unknown rating regardless of what the specification sheet says. A repaired phone should be assumed to have no rating at all unless the repairer specifically restored and tested the seals.

Warranty is the real limit

Here is the point that matters most and appears on the fewest specification sheets: most manufacturer warranties explicitly exclude liquid damage, including on phones sold with an IP68 rating. Phones contain liquid contact indicators that change colour permanently when wetted, and service centres check them.

So the rating tells you the phone will probably survive. It does not tell you the manufacturer will pay if it does not. Those are different promises, and only the first one is on the box.

What to do if a phone does get wet

Power it off and leave it off. Do not charge it — pushing current through a wet USB-C port is how a phone that would have survived does not, and modern phones will refuse to charge while they detect moisture in the port, which is a feature rather than a fault.

Do not use a hairdryer or a radiator; heat damages batteries and adhesive seals. The rice trick does essentially nothing except get starch in the ports. Leave the phone somewhere dry and moving-air for a day, port facing down. If it was salt water, rinse briefly in fresh water first, because leaving salt inside is worse than the water was.

Reading a rating on a phone you already own

If your phone is more than a year or two old, treat its rating as historical. Seals compress, adhesive weakens with every warm charging cycle, and one drop can break a seal without leaving a visible mark. Manufacturers state this in the small print — the rating describes the device as tested, not as it is after two years in a pocket.

If liquid damage genuinely worries you, a case, a habit of not taking the phone into the bathroom, and insurance do more for you than the two digits on a specification sheet.