Best Residential Proxies

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✓ last verified 2026-10-02 · every rate on this page was read from the provider’s live pricing page on that date · how we verify

A residential proxy routes your traffic through a real household internet connection, so the site you visit sees an ordinary consumer IP address instead of a server. That is the whole product. Everything else — pool size claims, dashboards, targeting controls — is packaging around that one function. Across the 12 providers whose pricing we have verified, the same gigabyte of residential bandwidth costs anywhere from $1.00 to $7.00, a spread of roughly 7× for a commodity. This page ranks them on rates we read ourselves, with the date attached.

The rankings, by verified price

Sorted by the cheapest rate each provider publishes. Where a headline number is a “from” or promotional figure whose conditions the provider does not state, it is labelled as such rather than presented as a price you can simply buy at — that distinction is where most comparison tables quietly mislead.

The verified market median entry rate is $3.50/GB. The cheapest flat, unconditional rate belongs to DataImpulse at $1.00/GB; the most expensive entry point we track is IPRoyal at $7.00/GB. Both sell the same category of product, which should tell you how little the sticker price alone explains. Prices are also falling: in our price history, a 100 GB month costs about 39% less than it did in July 2024.

What residential proxies actually cost per month

Providers price bandwidth, not months, so “cost per month” depends entirely on how much traffic you pull. Using verified rates, here is what realistic workloads come to:

Two things move that bill more than provider choice. First, page weight: HTML-only pages run 50–300 KB while rendering assets pushes 1–3 MB, a tenfold difference in spend for identical row counts. Second, proxy type: if your target does not fingerprint server IPs, datacenter bandwidth does the same job for a fraction of the price (see datacenter proxies).

How residential proxies work

You connect to a single gateway address with your credentials. The provider routes each request out through an exit node — a real device on a consumer ISP connection — and returns the response. By default the exit IP changes on every request, which is why these are also sold as rotating or backconnect proxies. When you need the same IP across several requests (a login, a cart, a paginated session), you request a sticky session and hold one exit for a provider-defined window, commonly one to thirty minutes.

The exit nodes themselves come from somewhere, and that supply chain is the least transparent part of this industry. Most pools are built from SDK partnerships, where an app pays users or offers a free tier in exchange for routing traffic through their device. The quality of that consent is exactly what separates a reputable provider from a legal problem — and in July 2026 it stopped being theoretical.

Are residential proxies legal?

Using a residential proxy is legal in the United States and the EU. It is ordinary infrastructure, used daily for ad verification, brand protection, price monitoring and market research. What creates liability is not the proxy but what you do through it: bypassing authentication, violating a site’s terms of service, scraping personal data in breach of privacy law, or credential stuffing.

The supply side carries its own risk. On July 2, 2026 the FBI seized the domains of NetNut, a major residential proxy provider, in an action coordinated with Google, whose threat-intelligence team describes NetNut as a residential proxy network also known as Popa (at least 2 million devices, by Google’s estimate); parent company Alarum said it was cooperating with law enforcement, announced a temporary pause of the affected network services on July 4, and as of October 2, 2026 we found no public announcement of charges (Krebs on Security, SecurityWeek). NetNut is excluded from every ranking on this site; the dated chronology is in our botnet & takedown timeline. The practical lesson: a provider that cannot explain how it obtains consent from the households carrying your traffic is a business continuity risk, not just an ethical one. See NetNut alternatives.

Can residential proxies be detected?

Yes, and increasingly often. Anti-bot systems no longer rely on IP reputation alone. They score TLS fingerprints, HTTP header order, browser automation signals, mouse and timing behaviour, and how many distinct sessions have recently appeared from the same address. A residential IP defeats the crudest check — the ASN lookup that flags datacenter ranges instantly — and nothing beyond it. You can see what that kind of lookup sees for any address with our free IP and proxy checker.

This is why pool freshness matters more than pool size. An IP that a hundred other customers scraped the same target through this week is burned regardless of how residential it looks. No provider publishes reuse rates, and we do not currently publish independent success-rate benchmarks either; anyone quoting precise per-provider success percentages across the whole market is either running a real testing lab or inventing numbers. Ours is on the methodology roadmap, and until it ships we say so.

Rotating, static and mobile: which type you need

Full breakdowns: static vs rotating, ISP vs residential and mobile vs residential.

Head-to-head: the shortlist most people end up with

Rankings tell you the field; comparisons tell you which of two providers wins at your volume, which frequently reverses between the entry tier and a terabyte:

• Decodo vs Oxylabs — a two published ladders, one much shorter
• Decodo vs Bright Data — identical PAYG rate, very different minimums
• Bright Data vs Oxylabs — the enterprise pair
• IPRoyal vs Webshare — non-expiring traffic against a cheaper ladder
• SOAX vs Decodo — geo-tiered against flat-rate
• IPRoyal vs Decodo
• Oxylabs vs SOAX

Every comparison →

Free residential proxies

There is no legitimate free residential proxy pool, and the phrase is worth understanding rather than searching for. Residential bandwidth costs the provider real money — they compensate the households carrying it — so anything given away free is monetising you another way: logging traffic, injecting content, harvesting credentials, or routing other people’s activity through your connection. Public proxy lists are the same deal without the disclosure.

The honest cheap options are paid and small: several providers in the table above start at a few dollars, and short free trials exist for legitimate evaluation. At $1.00/GB, a meaningful test costs less than lunch.

How to choose without guessing

1. Test datacenter first. If your target does not block it, residential is pure overspend at three to ten times the rate.
2. Size your real bandwidth. Multiply pages by average page weight before comparing per-GB rates; most people overestimate volume and buy tiers they never use.
3. Match billing to your usage shape. Steady monthly volume suits laddered plans; bursty or seasonal work suits non-expiring pay-as-you-go, where unused traffic is not forfeited.
4. Read the conditions on any headline rate. Several of the lowest advertised numbers in this market require terabyte commitments or are promotional for the first invoice only.
5. Ask how the pool is sourced. After the NetNut seizure this is a procurement question, not a philosophical one.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a residential proxy cost per month?

There is no monthly price — providers bill per gigabyte. On rates verified 2026-10-02, 50 GB costs about $50.00 at the cheapest flat rate and $175 at the market median, while 1 TB runs $1,000 to $3,500. Your bill is driven more by page weight and proxy type than by which provider you pick.

Are residential proxies illegal?

No. Using residential proxies is legal in the US and EU, and they are standard infrastructure for ad verification, price monitoring and market research. Liability comes from what you do through them — bypassing authentication, breaching site terms, or handling personal data unlawfully. Provider sourcing carries separate risk: in July 2026 the FBI seized NetNut-associated domains in an action coordinated with Google, whose threat-intelligence team describes NetNut as a residential proxy network also known as Popa.

What is the best residential proxy service?

It depends on the constraint. On verified price, DataImpulse at $1.00/GB is the cheapest flat rate we track. For published self-serve ladders, Decodo and Webshare; for enterprise procurement, Oxylabs and Bright Data; for geo-tiered targeting, SOAX. We do not publish a single ‘best’ because we do not yet run independent performance benchmarks, and ranking without them would be opinion dressed as data.

Can a residential proxy be detected?

Yes. Modern anti-bot systems score TLS fingerprints, header order, automation signals and behavioural timing alongside IP reputation. A residential IP only defeats the ASN check. Pool freshness — how recently other customers hit your target through the same IP — matters more than advertised pool size.

Are there free residential proxies?

Not legitimately. Residential bandwidth costs providers money to source, so free pools monetise differently: traffic logging, content injection, or routing strangers’ activity through your connection. Use a short paid trial or a few dollars of pay-as-you-go instead.

What is the difference between residential and datacenter proxies?

Residential IPs belong to real consumer ISP connections; datacenter IPs belong to servers and are identifiable by ASN. Datacenter starts around $0.30/GB versus $1.00/GB residential, so route by target difficulty: test datacenter first and escalate only on block evidence.