Best residential proxies in 2026

Residential proxies are IP addresses that belong to real households, assigned by consumer internet providers and relayed to you by a proxy network. The one thing a buyer must know is that you almost always pay for traffic, not for IPs: the price is quoted per GB, so every page, image and retry counts against your balance.

Websites treat these addresses like ordinary visitors, which is why residential proxies are the usual choice for heavily protected sites, geo-targeted checks such as SERP tracking and ad verification, and large data collection jobs. The trade-off is speed and consistency. A household connection is slower than a server, and the device behind the IP can go offline at any moment.

Pool sizes are headline numbers. Bright Data advertises 400M IPs, Oxylabs 175M, SOAX 155M and Decodo 115M. Those are vendor claims, not audited counts, and they say little about how many IPs you can actually reach in the one city you care about.

Rotating residential proxies give you a new exit IP on every request or on a timer, while static residential proxies keep one address for as long as you hold it. Which one you need depends on whether the job needs many identities or one stable identity.

Published rates in our database run from about $0.49 to $8 per GB, and the number you pay depends mostly on how much you buy. A provider that charges $4/GB for 5 GB may charge half that at 500 GB, so compare at your real monthly volume.

Decodo is a clean example of volume pricing: from $4 for 1 GB on pay as you go, falling through its plan ladder to $2/GB at 1 TB. Bright Data lists from $8 for 1 GB, with plans from $7/GB, and Oxylabs starts at $30 for 5 GB ($6/GB) with no pay as you go on residential. At the other end, DataImpulse sells from $1/GB and Evomi from $0.49/GB on a subscription, both with conditions covered in our guide to cheap residential proxies.

Before you commit, estimate your bill from page weight and request count with the proxy cost calculator. Heavy pages with images can use many times more traffic than the HTML alone.

When you buy residential proxies, check five things before you look at the headline price. Most disappointments come from one of them, not from the network itself.

Country targeting is universal, while city, ASN and ZIP targeting only matter when the result changes with the visitor's location or network. Local search results, regional prices, delivery availability and ad placements are the typical cases.

Depth varies. Oxylabs adds coordinate-level targeting, Decodo covers state, city, ASN and ZIP, and SOAX offers city and ASN targeting on every plan. Read the fine print, though: on Decodo, ASN targeting cannot be combined with other filters, and a very narrow target means a small slice of the pool, so you may see the same IPs more often than you expect.

It depends on the provider, and the answer is not visible from the price list. Residential IPs come from real people's devices, so the question is whether those people knowingly agreed to share their connection and were compensated or given something in return.

A reputable network should be able to explain where its IPs come from and what consent looks like. Ask for it in writing. Our data also records that Bright Data runs KYC checks for sensitive use cases, which is a signal that a vendor screens who gets access. Whatever you buy, the law and the terms of the sites you visit still apply to what you do with the traffic, and a lawyer should be consulted for business use.

Bright Data, Oxylabs and Decodo cover most of the brand searches, and they suit different buyers. Bright Data is aimed at businesses with the largest advertised pool, a no-card free trial and an open-source Proxy Manager, but the platform is complex for beginners. Read the Bright Data review for the details.

Oxylabs is enterprise oriented, with 24/7 chat and a $5 credit trial, but the $30 minimum is steep for a small test. Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, is the easier starting point: pay as you go, 24/7 support including Discord, and a 100 MB trial on mobile proxies with a 14-day refund. You can see the three side by side in our Decodo vs Oxylabs comparison.

Pick the provider whose price at your volume, targeting and trial terms fit the job, then test it with a small spend before scaling. Start with a trial or the smallest pack and send 100 URLs from your real target list.

Count the pages that came back correct, then divide the bill for the traffic by that number. That cost per successful page is the figure to compare, not the price per GB. Repeat with a second provider on the same URLs, at the same time of day, and keep the targeting settings identical. The ranking table above is the place to shortlist two or three candidates before you run that test.