I see people scratching their heads over this a lot so am dropping it here even though I’m sure it’s stated in many places already.

When you are at the dotnet command line (aka the CLI aka Command Line Interface) and type ‘dotnet’ you will be shown the version of the runtime.

When you add the version parameter (‘dotnet –version’) that will return the version of the SDK (aka CLI aka Command Line Interface) that you are working with.

Here’s an example:

If you are confused, you’re not alone. There’s a good discussion/debate on GitHub about how to alleviate this confusion at  What should dotnet –version display?