What Is a Residential Proxy? (And What It Costs in September 2026)

A residential proxy is an IP address issued by an internet service provider — a home or mobile connection — that a proxy company rents out. Your requests arrive at the target looking like they came from a real household, not a server room. The catch is that residential bandwidth is expensive, so the pricing is per GB, and the fine print decides whether the cheap row stays cheap.

What a residential proxy is, in plain English

Your own computer has one IP address, issued by your ISP. A datacenter proxy gives you an IP that lives in a server rack — fast, cheap, and instantly recognizable as a datacenter. A residential proxy gives you an IP that a real ISP issued to a real subscriber, and the proxy company has an arrangement to route traffic through it.

That single difference changes how targets treat you:

• A datacenter IP can be blocked by a rule: reject any request from this hosting range. Cheap to operate, easy to block.
• A residential IP looks like a person on a home connection. Blocking it means blocking real customers, which most sites will not do casually.

That is the entire value. Not speed — residential is usually slower than datacenter. Not anonymity magic. It is reputation: the IP your request arrives on is a class of address most targets treat as human.

How it works

The chain is: you → proxy provider’s gateway → residential IP → target site.

• The gateway is where you authenticate and where the provider decides which IP to use next.
• The residential IP is the exit — the address the target records in its logs.
• Rotation decides whether the next request exits through the same IP or a different one.
• Targeting decides which country, city, or ISP that exit IP belongs to.

Two knobs matter more than any other: rotation and targeting.

Rotating vs sticky

Rotating proxies hand you a new IP per request, or per short window. This spreads your traffic across thousands of addresses — the standard setup for scraping, where one IP hammering a site is exactly what triggers a block.

Sticky proxies hold one IP for a set time — minutes, hours, days. The site sees one consistent visitor. That is what you want for a logged-in session, a checkout flow, or any job where a site expects to recognize you.

As of 2026-09-19, the providers in our dataset that publish both session types are Bright Data, Decodo, Webshare, Infatica and Rayobyte. IPRoyal does not publish its session types — the field is marked not published on its pricing page.

Targeting depth

Residential proxies are sold by how precisely you can pick the exit IP:

• Country — the baseline. Every provider on the list covers 100+ countries; Bright Data publishes 195, Webshare 195, Decodo 195+.
• City and region — common mid-tier targeting. Webshare publishes city targeting; SOAX publishes region and city.
• ISP and ASN — the deep end. You ask for a specific internet provider, not just a city. SOAX publishes ISP targeting with ASN+ZIP on its Scale and Enterprise plans.

Deeper targeting costs more per GB and shrinks the pool you draw from. That is a trade, not a bug.

What a residential proxy costs — September 2026

All entry rates below were read from the vendor’s own page on 2026-09-19. “Entry” means the smallest plan you can buy; volume tiers are cheaper per GB.

Read 2026-09-19. “From” prices are as printed by the vendor. Promo rates show the list price they are discounted from.

Why prices vary so much

The same gigabyte costs $1.75 at IPRoyal and $6.00 at Oxylabs. Four reasons, all visible in the data:

1. Promo state. Half this table is on sale. Bright Data, Webshare and ProxyEmpire all publish 50%-off entry rates; the list prices are $7–8/GB. A promo is a price with a condition — budget for the list rate after it ends.
2. Pool economics. A 400M+ pool (Bright Data) costs more to maintain than a 45M+ pool (Infatica). You are paying for coverage depth and rare locations.
3. Product breadth. Oxylabs sells residential and a web unblocker, a scraper API and SOCKS5 — the $6/GB entry carries that machinery. SOAX sells a plan plus metered usage, not a plain per-GB price.
4. What is not published. Pool size is not published by Oxylabs, SOAX, ProxyEmpire and Rayobyte on their pricing pages as of 2026-09-19. When you cannot verify the pool, price is all you are comparing.

When you need one — and when you don’t

You need residential when the target blocks datacenter ranges and you have tested it. You do not need it because a blog said so.

• You need it: target returns 403 to datacenter IPs, you need many addresses spread across a country, or you are automating a site that fingerprints hosting ranges.
• You don’t: the target accepts datacenter traffic. Datacenter rotating proxies start at $0.30/GB (Rayobyte, 2026-09-19) — roughly a tenth of residential entry rates. Start there and upgrade when the 403s start. The comparison is on residential vs datacenter.

A consumer VPN is not the fallback either — VPN exit IPs are datacenter IPs with extra steps. For scraping, a proxy is the tool; the VPN channel covers where a VPN genuinely helps.

Who wrote this

Written by the Runein operator — the same person who pays for and runs these tools. Corrections and vendor price changes go to [email protected] and are re-read, re-dated and logged. Disclosure: some links on this page point to vendor official sites; if we later add affiliate links, buying through one may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes what we recommend.