What are residential proxies? They are proxies that send your requests through IP addresses belonging to real home internet connections, so websites see an ordinary household visitor instead of a server. This guide explains what a residential IP is, how residential proxy networks work behind the scenes, where the IPs come from, the difference between rotating, sticky and static residential proxies, what they are used for, their limits, and how to choose a provider. When you are ready to try them, see our rotating residential proxies.
The short version
A residential proxy is a proxy whose exit IP is a home internet connection assigned by a consumer internet provider. Because the IP looks like a normal household, websites rarely block it outright, and you can choose the country, city or even the provider it comes from. That makes residential proxies the standard tool for collecting public web data, checking local prices, search results and ads, and testing sites from other locations.
Chapters and transcript
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:25 What is a residential proxy?
- 0:54 How a residential proxy works
- 1:31 Why websites treat residential IPs differently
- 2:01 Where residential IPs come from, and is it legal?
- 2:33 Rotating vs sticky residential proxies
- 3:00 Targeting: country, city, ZIP, ISP and ASN
- 3:31 What are residential proxies used for?
- 4:00 When another proxy type fits better
- 4:32 Try it yourself
Intro. Every time you visit a website, it sees an IP address, and it can look up who that address belongs to. A hosting company? A mobile carrier? Or a home internet provider, like the one in your living room? That last kind is what residential proxies use. In the next few minutes you'll learn what a residential proxy is, how it works, where the IPs come from, and when a residential proxy is the right choice. And when it isn't.
What is a residential proxy? A residential proxy is a proxy server whose exit IP address belongs to a real home internet connection, one that an internet provider assigned to a household. When you send a request through it, the website doesn't see your own IP. It sees that home IP, so your request looks like it comes from an ordinary visitor in that place. Datacenter proxies use addresses owned by hosting companies. Mobile proxies use addresses from mobile carriers. Residential proxies use addresses from home internet providers.
How a residential proxy works. Here's how a residential proxy works, step by step. First, your tool connects to the proxy gateway with a host, a port, a username and a password. With ProxyEmpire, that's v2.proxyempire.io on port 5000, over HTTP or SOCKS5. Second, your settings choose the exit: the country, the city, and whether the IP should change. Third, the gateway forwards your request through a home connection that matches. The website sees that household's IP and answers the way it would answer a local visitor. The response comes back to you the same way, and the gateway never passes your own IP along.
Why websites treat residential IPs differently. Why do websites treat residential IPs differently? Because who owns an IP address is public information. Anyone can look up that an address belongs to a hosting company, and many sites challenge datacenter ranges by default, since real shoppers and readers rarely browse from a server. A residential IP is registered to a consumer internet provider, the same as the site's real visitors. So requests through residential proxies meet fewer blocks and CAPTCHAs. Fewer, not none: a site can still limit traffic that behaves like a bot.
Where residential IPs come from, and is it legal? Where do residential IPs come from? From real people's home connections. Reputable networks only use households that knowingly agreed to share a small part of their connection, usually in exchange for something of value, and that can opt out. ProxyEmpire's residential IPs are ethically sourced. Networks built on malware or hidden software are a legal risk for everyone who uses them, so ask any provider how consent is obtained. Using residential proxies is legal in most countries. What matters is what you do with them.
Rotating vs sticky residential proxies. Residential proxies can give you a new IP on every request, or keep one IP for a whole session. With rotation per request, each request leaves from a different home IP, which spreads a large job across many addresses. With a sticky session, the same IP stays until you rotate it or the device behind it goes offline. There's no fixed time limit. That suits tasks with several steps that should come from one address. You can also rotate on a timer of up to two hours.
Targeting: country, city, ZIP, ISP and ASN. Residential proxies let you choose where your IP is. ProxyEmpire's residential pool has more than 30 million IPs in over 170 countries. You can target a country, then a region, a city, or even a ZIP code. You can pick the internet provider, or the ASN, the number that identifies a provider's network. You can even set the operating system fingerprint: Windows, macOS, Linux or Android. All targeting is included at no extra charge, and residential plans are billed per gigabyte.
What are residential proxies used for? Residential proxies are used wherever you need to see the web the way local visitors see it, at scale. Price and product monitoring: tracking prices, stock and listings across shops and countries. Local search results: checking how pages rank in a given city. Ad verification: making sure ads show up in the right place with the right landing page. And market research: collecting public web data that sites show differently by location.
When another proxy type fits better. When is another proxy type the better choice? Residential IPs are real home connections, so speed varies more than on servers, and you pay per gigabyte. If a site is easy to reach, datacenter proxies are faster and cheaper. If you need the same IP for weeks, choose static residential, also called ISP proxies, billed per IP. For the strictest sites, or to see what phone users see, use mobile proxies. And if you move huge volumes, unlimited residential proxies are billed by connection speed instead of gigabytes.
Try it yourself. If you want to test this yourself, ProxyEmpire's $1.97 trial includes 100 megabytes of residential and 50 megabytes of mobile data, and it doesn't expire. Connect, send a request through a residential IP, and check the result with our free proxy checker. The links are in the description. Thanks for watching.
What Are Residential Proxies?
A home IP address for your requestsAny proxy relays your requests and shows the website its own IP address instead of yours. What makes a proxy residential is the kind of IP it shows: an address that a consumer internet provider has assigned to a home connection, such as a cable, fibre or DSL line. To the website, the request looks like it came from someone browsing at home in that city, on that provider’s network.
That is the difference from datacenter proxies, whose addresses belong to hosting and cloud companies, and from mobile proxies, whose addresses belong to mobile carriers. Our comparison of residential, mobile and datacenter proxies covers all three in detail.
A residential proxy borrows the most ordinary identity on the internet: a household connection.
What Makes an IP Address Residential?
It depends on who owns the networkIP addresses are handed out through a registry system: the regional internet registries allocate address blocks to network operators, and each operator announces its blocks on the internet under an autonomous system number (ASN). A consumer internet provider assigns addresses from its blocks to its customers’ home routers. Those addresses are residential.
- Registration tells the story. Anyone can look up which organisation an IP belongs to and what kind of network it is. That is how websites distinguish home broadband from a server farm.
- Home IPs change. Many providers assign dynamic addresses that change from time to time, and some share one public address between several customers. Our dynamic residential IP guide explains how and when they change.
- Location follows the network. Because the provider knows where its lines are, geolocation databases can map residential IPs to a city or region fairly accurately.
Why this matters for proxies
Websites rarely decide on IP type alone, but it is usually the first signal they check, because it is instant and cheap. A request from a hosting company range invites closer inspection or an outright challenge; a request from a household broadband range gets the benefit of the doubt that ordinary visitors get. That is the whole value of a residential proxy: it lets automated or remote work start from the same footing as a person browsing at home, in the city and on the provider you choose.
How Residential Proxies Work
A gateway in front of millions of home connectionsYou do not connect to someone’s home directly. A residential proxy network puts a gateway, sometimes called a backconnect server, in front of its pool of residential connections.
- You connect to the gateway with a host, port, username and password. For ProxyEmpire that is
v2.proxyempire.ioon port5000, over HTTP or SOCKS5. - Your settings pick the exit. Country, region, city, ZIP, ISP or ASN, and whether you want a new IP per request or a sticky session.
- The gateway forwards your request through a residential connection that matches, and the website sees that connection’s IP.
- The response comes back through the gateway to you.
your app --> gateway (v2.proxyempire.io:5000) --> residential connection --> website
<-- <-- <-- responsecurl -x http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@v2.proxyempire.io:5000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# "org" shows a home internet provider; "city" shows where the IP isWhere Do Residential IPs Come From?
The question every buyer should askA residential proxy network needs access to real home connections, and how it gets that access matters. Reputable networks source IPs from people who have knowingly agreed to share a small part of their connection, typically in exchange for something of value, and who can opt out. Networks built on malware or hidden software are unethical and a legal risk for everyone who uses them.
When you compare providers, ask them directly how their residential IPs are sourced and how consent is obtained. ProxyEmpire’s network of more than 30 million residential IPs is ethically sourced, and its uptime is published on a public status page.
Rotating, Sticky and Static Residential Proxies
Three ways to use a residential IP| Type | How the IP behaves | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Rotating | A new IP for every request | Collecting many independent pages without per-IP limits |
| Sticky session | The same IP for a series of requests, until you rotate it or the device behind it goes offline | Logins, carts, paging through results |
| Static (ISP) | One residential IP reserved for you for the whole rental period | Accounts, allowlists, long-lived identities |
Which mode to choose depends on the task, not on the site. Scraping a list of product pages is a rotating job: each page is independent, so each can come from a different household. Logging in, filling a basket or paging through search results is a sticky job: the site expects the same visitor from start to finish. Managing an account for months is a static job. Many projects use all three.
Rotating and sticky are two modes of the same pool, billed per GB of traffic. Static residential proxies are a separate product billed per IP; ProxyEmpire sells them in 24 countries. For very large volumes, unlimited residential proxies are billed by connection speed instead of per GB, in 85+ countries. Our guides to sticky vs rotating proxies and ISP vs residential proxies go deeper.
What Residential Proxies Are Used For
Wherever the website must see a real local visitor- Web scraping and data collection. Spreading requests over many home IPs avoids the rate limits that stop a single server. See our web scraping hub.
- Price monitoring. Retailers show different prices and stock by location; residential IPs in each city show the local offer. See price monitoring.
- SEO and SERP tracking. Search results depend on the searcher’s location. See proxies for SEO.
- Ad verification. Confirm that ads appear correctly in each market, and catch fraud. See ad verification proxies.
- Market research and brand protection. See competitors’ sites and marketplaces as local customers do.
- Testing localized sites. Check redirects, languages, currencies and content by country before launch.
Key takeaways
- A residential proxy uses an IP address that a consumer internet provider assigned to a home.
- A gateway routes your requests through a pool of residential connections you target by location and provider.
- Rotating gives a new IP per request, sticky keeps one for a session, static reserves one for you.
- Ask every provider how its residential IPs are sourced.
Limits to Know About
Residential is not magic- Speed varies. Each exit is a real home connection, so latency and bandwidth vary more than on servers.
- Sessions can end. A sticky IP stays until you rotate it or the device behind it goes offline; build retries into long tasks.
- Cost per GB. Residential traffic costs more than datacenter. Fetch only what you need.
- IP is only one signal. Websites also look at request rate, headers, cookies and browser fingerprints. A residential IP will not hide an aggressive bot.
- Rules still apply. Use residential proxies for lawful purposes and within website terms. ProxyEmpire blocks banking, payment and government websites by default, and opens only ports 80 and 443 by default.
Getting the best results
Most failed requests through residential proxies have nothing to do with the IP. Send realistic headers, keep cookies within a session, respect the site’s pace, and retry failures with a short pause and a fresh IP. Match the proxy location to the site: a German shop checked from a German IP behaves like it does for its real customers. And measure: track success rates per site, so you notice early when a target changes its defences.
How to Choose a Residential Proxy Provider
Seven questions- How are the IPs sourced? Look for clear, consent-based sourcing.
- How large is the pool, and where? Check the countries and cities you need, not just the headline number.
- What targeting is included? Country, region, city, ZIP, ISP and ASN. At ProxyEmpire all of it is included at no extra charge.
- Which rotation options? Per request, sticky sessions and custom intervals.
- How is it priced? Per GB, with or without expiry. ProxyEmpire starts at $3.50 per GB pay-as-you-go, falls to $1.50 per GB on larger plans, and unused bandwidth rolls over.
- What about limits? Concurrent sessions, blocked site categories, open ports.
- How good is support? ProxyEmpire’s support is available 24/7 and is made up of real people.
Avoid free residential proxy lists. A free “residential” proxy is usually either not residential or someone’s compromised device, and in both cases the operator can see and alter your traffic.
How to Start Using Residential Proxies
Five minutes to your first request- Create an account and start the $1.97 trial, which includes 100 MB of residential and 50 MB of mobile bandwidth.
- In the dashboard’s connection builder, choose the country and, if needed, the region, city or ISP.
- Choose rotation: a new IP per request, or a sticky session.
- Copy the proxy details into your browser extension, scraper or tool, and check the exit IP with our proxy checker.
Guides for common setups: Chrome, Python, Android and iPhone.
Residential Proxies FAQ
Straight answersWhat is a residential proxy in simple terms?
A proxy that makes your requests come from a real home internet connection, so websites see an ordinary household visitor in the location you choose.
What is a residential IP address?
An IP address that a consumer internet provider assigns to a home connection, as opposed to addresses owned by hosting companies or mobile carriers.
How do residential proxies work?
You connect to the provider’s gateway with your credentials and settings; the gateway forwards each request through a matching home connection, and the website sees that connection’s IP.
Are residential proxies legal?
Yes, when the IPs are ethically sourced and you use them for lawful purposes within each website’s terms.
What is the difference between rotating and static residential proxies?
Rotating proxies give you a new IP per request or a sticky session from a large shared pool, billed per GB. Static residential proxies give you one fixed IP reserved for you, billed per IP.
Are residential proxies better than datacenter proxies?
For websites that limit server traffic, yes. Datacenter proxies are faster and cheaper, so they remain the better choice where a site does not care about IP type.
Why are residential proxies more expensive?
Each IP is a real home connection that has to be sourced, maintained and routed, which costs more than renting server IP ranges.
References
Primary documentation- RFC 7020: The Internet Numbers Registry SystemHow IP address blocks are allocated to networks
- RFC 1930: Guidelines for creation, selection, and registration of an Autonomous SystemWhat an ASN is
- RFC 1928: SOCKS Protocol Version 5The SOCKS5 protocol used by many proxy gateways
Real home IPs, wherever you need them
More than 30 million ethically sourced residential IPs, targeting by country, city, ZIP, ISP and ASN at no extra cost, a new IP per request or sticky sessions, unused bandwidth that rolls over, and 24/7 support from real people. Try it for $1.97.
