What Is a Residential Proxy? A Beginner's Guide

Residential proxies are the most talked-about type of proxy — and for good reason. They're the key to accessing sites that block ordinary automated traffic. Here's what they are and how they work.

The definition

A residential proxy routes your requests through a real device connected to a home internet service. The IP address belongs to an ISP and a genuine household, so to any website your traffic looks like an ordinary person browsing from home.

How they work

When you send a request through a residential proxy, it exits from a home IP in the provider's pool. Good providers hold millions of IPs across many countries and source them ethically through opt-in partners, which keeps trust scores high and CAPTCHAs low.

Why they're hard to block

Websites can't easily ban residential IPs because doing so would also block real customers on the same connections. That's why residential proxies succeed where datacenter proxies get blocked — a trade-off we cover in residential vs datacenter proxies.

Rotating and sticky sessions

Residential proxies can rotate to a new IP on every request or hold a sticky session for multi-step tasks. Learn more in what is a rotating proxy.

What next?

Now you know what they are, see what residential proxies are used for to decide if they fit your project, or explore the full range of proxy types.