Best US Residential Proxies in 2026: 11 Providers Compared by Price per GB
11 providers · prices re-verified 8 September 2026 · Quantum Proxies from $0.80/GB
The cheapest way to buy US residential proxies in September 2026 is a flat pay-as-you-go rate of $0.80–$1.00 per GB; list prices at the largest networks run $7–8 per GB before promo codes. This page compares 11 providers against our own plans on the numbers that decide your bill: entry price, volume price, free trial and how precisely you can target the United States.
- 11 competitors compared with Quantum Proxies
- $0.80 lowest published at-volume price per GB in the table
- 8 Sep 2026 date every price was re-verified
- 100 MB our free trial, 5 days, no card
How we compared (8 September 2026)
Every price in the table was read from the provider's public pricing page on 8 September 2026, from a US exit, and cross-checked against the page text or its structured offer data. We recorded six things per provider: the entry price for pay-as-you-go traffic (or the smallest plan where there is no PAYG), the cheapest published per-GB tier and what it takes to reach it, whether a free trial exists and what it contains, how finely you can target the United States, the protocols supported, and how long a sticky session can hold one IP.
Promotional prices are shown next to the list price and labelled as promos, because a 50% code that expires in three months is not a price. Two providers were left out because their pricing pages could not be read reliably on the verification date. We name competitors but do not link to them, and we do not claim success rates for anyone, ourselves included.
What "US residential" actually means
A residential IP is an address a consumer internet provider has assigned to a household connection: a cable modem in Ohio, a fibre line in Texas, a DSL router in Maine. Websites geolocate visitors from the IP's registration and routing data, so a request through a US residential proxy is served the way a US visitor is served: local prices, local search results, local availability. That is the whole product; the rest of this page is about what you pay for it and how precisely you choose where the IP sits.
Precision matters more than pool size for most US jobs. A price check on a retailer that quotes shipping by ZIP needs an IP in the right state, a rank-tracking run for Denver needs Denver, and an ad-verification job has to land in the exact market that was bought. Country-only targeting gives you "somewhere in the United States", which is fine for national catalogues and useless for anything regional.
The three price bands you will see
US residential pricing in 2026 sits in three bands. The flat band is $0.80–$1.00 per GB: DataImpulse, PacketStream and our Residential Basic tier all charge about a dollar with no subscription, differing mainly in minimum purchase ($5, $50 and $25 respectively) and in targeting depth. The middle band is $2–5 per GB pay-as-you-go: Decodo at $4, Webshare's 1 GB plan and Proxy-Seller at $3.50, SOAX and NodeMaven at $5, our Residential Premium at $4 for 1 GB.
The top band is the $7–8 list price at Bright Data, IPRoyal and ProxyEmpire, usually shown next to a promo of $3.50–4. Those networks reach $1.75–2.50 per GB only on committed plans from roughly $2,000 a month or 10 TB of traffic. Oxylabs has no pay-as-you-go option at all: $6 per GB on a $30 monthly plan, $2.50 on the 1 TB plan. Sales-quoted figures such as "from $0.75 for 5 TB+" are not published tiers and are not in the table.
Our own offer, honestly
Quantum Proxies sells two residential tiers from the same 90M+ IP pool, both pay-as-you-go on a wallet topped up from $5, no subscription, balance never expires. Residential Basic is the budget tier: $1.00 per GB from 25 GB, $0.90 at 500 GB, $0.80 at 1,000 GB, valid 90–360 days, with country, state, city and ASN targeting and sticky sessions from 3 minutes. Residential Premium is priced for finer control: $4 for 1 GB, $2.50 per GB at 100 GB and $2.20 at 500 GB, with sticky sessions up to 120 minutes.
US targeting covers 49 states plus DC, with cities under each state, written into the proxy username. HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 are all supported. The free trial is 100 MB of Residential Basic, valid 5 days, unlocked by a one-time SMS verification with no card. What we do not offer: a dedicated account manager, or any promise about success rates on a given site.
When it is worth paying more
Pay the middle or top band when the job needs something the dollar tier does not sell. City-level and ASN precision across many metros is the usual reason: if your ad-verification or rank-tracking contract names forty US cities, a provider that only offers country targeting cannot deliver it, whatever the price. Support terms are the second reason: enterprise plans at Bright Data, Oxylabs and Decodo come with account managers and contractual SLAs that a $5 top-up does not.
Pool depth is the third. National rotating scrapes at hundreds of GB a day exhaust a small provider's US inventory and you start seeing repeats; the very large networks publish their pool sizes for this reason. If none of these three applies, the extra $2–7 per GB is buying reputation rather than results, and the only way to know is to test.
When a flat $1/GB provider is enough
Most US residential work is national, rotating and tolerant of the occasional slow IP: price grids, catalogue snapshots, search results, availability checks, public listing data. For those, country- or state-level targeting is enough and the per-GB rate is what decides the bill. At 200 GB a month the difference between $1.00 and $4.00 per GB is $600, every month.
Check three things before you commit to a flat-rate provider. The minimum purchase: PacketStream asks $50 up front, DataImpulse $5, our Residential Basic $25 for 25 GB. Whether the rate includes state and city targeting and sticky sessions, or only country-level rotation. And validity: traffic that expires in 30 days costs more than the sticker price if you do not use it. Our Basic plans keep traffic for 90–360 days and the wallet balance never expires.
How to test any provider in an hour
Take the trial or the smallest top-up and run three checks against the targeting you actually bought, then compare the bill for the traffic you used, minimum purchase included, with the quoted per-GB rate.
- Targeting: request an IP checker through the proxy with a state or city set, twenty times. Every exit should geolocate to the state you asked for; log the ISP names so you can see whether the pool is genuinely residential or padded with hosting ranges.
- Your real target: fetch 200 pages from the site you care about with rotating IPs and count 2xx responses, timeouts and challenge pages. No marketing page tells you this number; your own run does.
- Sticky stability: open a session with a 10-minute TTL and poll the IP checker every 30 seconds. The address should not change until the TTL expires. Repeat with the longest TTL the provider sells if your job involves logins or carts.
US residential proxies compared (prices re-verified 8 September 2026)
| Provider | From ($/GB) | At volume ($/GB) | Free trial | US targeting | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quantum Proxies (this site) | $0.80 (Residential Basic; $1.00 at 25 GB) | $0.80 at 1,000 GB Basic; Premium $2.20 at 500 GB | 100 MB free, 5 days, SMS verification, no card | State, city and ASN (49 states + DC) | Pay-as-you-go scraping with no subscription |
| Bright Data | $8.00 list ($4.00 with a 3-month promo code) | $2.50 on the 798 GB plan ($1,999/mo) | Free trial; first deposit matched up to $500 | Country/state/city | Large committed monthly volumes |
| Oxylabs | No PAYG; from $2.50 on the 1 TB plan | $2.50 at 1 TB ($2,500/mo); $6.00 on the 5 GB plan | On request, once per client | Country/state/city | Enterprise monthly subscriptions |
| Decodo | $4.00 PAYG ($3.75 on the 3 GB plan) | $2.00 on the 1,000 GB/mo enterprise plan | 3 days, 100 MB; 14-day money-back | Country/state/city | Small monthly plans with a refund window |
| IPRoyal | $7.35 PAYG ($7.00 on subscription) | $1.75 on subscription from 10 TB ($1.84 PAYG) | None | Country/state/city | Bulk purchases of 10 TB and up |
| DataImpulse | $1.00 PAYG ($5 minimum, 5 GB) | $0.80 from 1 TB | None shown | Country | Flat $1/GB from a $5 top-up |
| Webshare | $3.50 on the 1 GB monthly plan (no PAYG top-up) | $1.40 on the 3,000 GB/mo plan | No residential trial (free plan is 10 datacenter proxies) | Country | Monthly plans that scale down with size |
| SOAX | $5.00 (Sandbox, $0/mo) | $0.85 on the Enterprise plan ($3,000/mo) | None shown; Sandbox is pay per GB | Country/state/city | One rate across residential and mobile on committed plans |
| NodeMaven | $5.00 PAYG (2 GB) | $2.20 on the 1,000 GB monthly plan ($2.45 PAYG) | Paid: $3.50 for 750 MB | Country | Monthly plans between 2 GB and 1 TB |
| Proxy-Seller | $3.50 PAYG (1 GB) | $2.20 on the 100 GB plan ($220/mo) | None shown | Country | Small monthly plans from 3 GB |
| PacketStream | $1.00 | $1.00 (single flat rate) | On request (form) | Country | Flat $1/GB with a $50 minimum, no subscription |
| ProxyEmpire | $7.00 list ($3.50 with a 50% promo code) | $3.00 list on the 1,000 GB plan ($1.50 with the code) | Paid: $1.97 on all plans | Country | Plans from 1 GB PAYG to 1,000 GB, priced around a promo code |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cheapest US residential proxy in 2026?
On published prices, the lowest per-GB rate in our table is $0.80: Quantum Proxies Residential Basic at 1,000 GB and DataImpulse from 1 TB. PacketStream charges a flat $1.00 with a $50 minimum. SOAX reaches $0.85, but only on a $3,000-a-month plan. Sales-quoted "from $0.75" figures for 5 TB and up are not published tiers.
Do these prices include US targeting?
At every provider in the table, choosing the United States as the country costs nothing extra; the per-GB rate is global. State and city selection are included where offered, at Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo, IPRoyal, SOAX and Quantum Proxies. What differs is depth: some providers stop at the country, and ASN selection is rarer still.
Pay-as-you-go or subscription?
Pay-as-you-go wins when usage is irregular or below a few hundred GB a month, because you buy only what you use and nothing renews. Subscriptions win when you can commit: the $1.75–2.50 tiers at Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo and IPRoyal require monthly plans or multi-TB purchases. Our plans are pay-as-you-go at every size, from 25 GB to 1,000 GB.
Are the promo prices permanent?
No. Bright Data's $4 and ProxyEmpire's $3.50 are 50% codes valid for a limited period (three months at Bright Data); after that the list price of $7–8 per GB applies. Treat a promo as the first invoice, not the price, and check what a renewal costs before building a budget around it.
Do I need ISP proxies instead of residential?
Only if the job needs the same IP for days or weeks: a set of accounts you manage, a tool that whitelists one address, a long-running dashboard session. Rotating residential per GB is cheaper and better for collection. Our USA ISP proxies are dedicated static residential-range IPs from $3.80 per IP per month with unmetered bandwidth.
Which providers offer a free trial for US residential proxies?
Quantum Proxies (100 MB, 5 days, SMS verification, no card), Decodo (3 days, 100 MB), Bright Data (free trial plus a matched first deposit) and Oxylabs (on request, once per client). PacketStream takes trial requests by form. IPRoyal and DataImpulse show no free trial; NodeMaven and ProxyEmpire sell paid trials at $3.50 and $1.97.
How often is this comparison updated?
The prices come from our proxy pricing index, which is re-verified against each provider's public pricing page from a US exit; the table title carries the verification date, currently 8 September 2026. When the index is refreshed, the table and this date change with it. If a number looks stale, the provider's own page wins.
Sources
- Proxy server (Wikipedia)
- Internet geolocation (Wikipedia)
- RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics
- Proxy servers and tunneling (MDN)
- Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites (Google Search Central)
Related
- USA Residential Proxies
- Residential Proxies (all countries)
- Residential Basic Proxies
- Proxy Provider Alternatives
- Residential Proxy Pricing Index
- Free Trial Proxies
- USA ISP Proxies
- All Residential Proxies
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