What Is a Residential Proxy?

How a residential proxy works

You sign in to the provider's gateway using your account credentials. The gateway passes your connection to an exit: a device sitting on someone's home connection. That device opens the connection to the website, which sees the home IP address.

What makes the address residential is who it is registered to. IP intelligence databases classify ranges by the kind of network behind them. MaxMind's connection type database uses the values Cable/DSL, Cellular, Corporate and Satellite. A residential proxy exit typically reads as Cable/DSL and a mobile proxy as Cellular. Data center servers have no value of their own in that list; MaxMind marks hosting providers in its Anonymous IP data instead.

Most residential products are pools. You do not rent one address; you ask the gateway for an exit in a country or city, and it picks one for each request or for a sticky session of a few minutes.

Where the IPs come from

A pool needs many home connections, and the provider does not own them. The FBI's March 12, 2026 public service announcement, Evading Residential Proxy Networks, lists how devices end up in these networks:

• App SDKs. Developers are paid per install to include code that routes proxy traffic through users' devices in the background.
• VPN and utility apps whose terms of service, which most users never read, allow it.
• Bandwidth-sharing apps that pay users for their connection.
• Compromised devices. Connected devices configured with malicious software before they are sold, and malware hidden in pirated content.

The FBI's warning to owners is direct: their address can make them appear responsible for traffic they never sent. Its June 2025 BADBOX 2.0 announcement described millions of infected streaming boxes, projectors and similar devices whose access was sold as residential proxy service.

In January 2026, Google's Threat Intelligence Group disrupted the IPIDEA network, which it called one of the largest residential proxy networks in the world. Google reported that over a seven-day period more than 550 threat groups used IPIDEA exit addresses, and that its action reduced the devices available to the operators by millions.

Researchers saw this years earlier. Mi and colleagues at IEEE Security and Privacy 2019 measured about 6 million residential proxy IPs and found that many likely ran on compromised hosts, including connected devices, despite providers' claims that hosts joined willingly.

Not every provider sources this way, and some operate opt-in programs. The point is that a residential exit is someone else's connection, and the buyer rarely sees how consent was obtained.

How residential proxies are billed

Shared residential products are usually billed by traffic, per gigabyte, because the provider pays for, or shares revenue on, each exit's bandwidth. That makes cost depend on page weight: a scraper that loads images and scripts can use many times the traffic of one that requests only the HTML it needs.

Static residential addresses, often sold as ISP proxies, are different. They are addresses registered to a consumer provider but hosted on servers, billed per address per period. They keep one IP, but they are not on a real home connection.

Before comparing offers, measure your own traffic per task on a small plan, then multiply. A headline price per gigabyte means little until you know how many gigabytes your job uses.

How residential proxies are detected

Residential exits are harder to block than data center addresses, because blocking a home IP can block a real customer. They are not invisible. MaxMind's Anonymous IP database has an is_residential_proxy field, set when an address is on a suspected anonymizing network and belongs to a residential provider, alongside separate flags for VPNs, hosting providers, public proxies and Tor exits.

Other signals that give a pool exit away:

• Churn. Home devices go offline, so sessions end early and exits change.
• Shared history. Other customers used the same exit before you.
• Mismatches. A browser in one time zone and language on a home IP in another country.

The detection guide covers these checks for mobile lines, and most apply to residential exits too.

Alternatives

Which type fits depends on whether you need many addresses briefly or one address for a long time.

A dedicated mobile line is the steady option on a carrier network. On Coronium, each line is one physical device with its own SIM, rented to one customer, with HTTP and SOCKS5 access. Data is not metered on dedicated lines, apart from Brazil lines, which carry 20 GB a month. Lines are billed for 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, and not every carrier offers all three. For a VPN-style setup on a mobile IP, see the residential VPN on mobile lines. For a side-by-side of the main types, see residential, datacenter and mobile proxies explained.

Frequently asked questions