You get a French IP by sending your traffic out through a French internet provider. A residential proxy hands you one of their home addresses. French sites then answer with what a visitor in France sees, from euro prices to French search results.
Four numbers are worth knowing first. Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues hold 67.7% of France's IPv4 addresses. 85.8% of French users can already browse over IPv6. Seller pools equal 7.6% or less of the 81.6 million addresses. And 42 of the 44 working free French proxies on our list were flagged on October 26, 2026. Our residential proxies target France at $0.50/GB for one GB.
Who holds France's IP addresses?
RIPE NCC, Europe's internet registry, lists every block it gives out, with the holder's country. Its file, with records to October 24, 2026, lists 81,555,536 IPv4 addresses for France, in 4,581 blocks held by 1,798 holders:
Orange's record still carries the France Telecom name and covers 23,367,168 addresses. SFR follows with 16,322,816. Free holds 8,413,184 under its Proxad record, which calls the first block a "Dynamic pool", plus 1,058,816 more for Free Mobile. Bouygues Telecom's record names its block a "Pool for Broadband DSL customers".
Below them come two hosting firms and some unexpected holders. OVH and Scaleway hold 6.2 million addresses between them. Electricité de France holds 2,586,368, and IRSN, the national institute for radiation protection and nuclear safety, 1,056,768. The ten largest records cover 81.8% of the space.
France also leads on IPv6. APNIC Labs measured 85.8% of French users as IPv6-capable in the 30 days to October 23, 2026, against 43.7% in October 2020.
How do the French pools add up?
To a few percent of the registry. Five sellers' France pages, read through our server on October 26, 2026:
| Seller | Advertised | Of France's IPv4 |
|---|---|---|
| Shifter | 6,229,070 | 7.6% |
| Oxylabs | 5,174,969 | 6.3% |
| SOAX | 3,479,400 | 4.3% |
| Bright Data | 713,102 | 0.87% |
| DataImpulse | 193,170 in 30 days | 0.24% |
For Bright Data we listed the title's 713,102. The same page's text says 178,275 France IPs, one quarter of that.
Oxylabs' figure spans residential, mobile, SOCKS5 and datacenter proxies. Only DataImpulse splits its count by time. It shows 58,079 French IPs in a day, 193,170 in a month and 31,245 online at once. We publish no pool size per country for our own network.
What does a French IP change?
The version of the web you get. Google's help page notes that "IP addresses are roughly based on geography" and that location "helps to show you nearby results". Residential Lite covers France at the lowest rate. With Residential Premium you can pick a city. Our France proxies page lists 2,905, more than for any country but one, across 13 regions and 110 networks.
Sites still run their own checks on every visit. MaxMind's Anonymous IP database, sold to sites, carries a flag for residential proxies. Our guide to how websites detect proxies covers the other signals.
Why do free French proxies fail?
They sit in French data centers. Our tracker has logged 9,789 French addresses from public free proxy lists since May 13, 2026, and 2,756 worked at least once. The 44 working on October 26, 2026 looked like this:
Contabo carried 12 of them, OVH 10 and Scaleway 10, and only one sat on a consumer network, Bouygues Telecom. A French hosting address is an easy flag for any site that checks. Use free proxies to test code. Our free proxy list for France shows the working ones.
How do you pay from France?
With a card or with crypto. Visa and Mastercard payments start at $10 and crypto payments at $3, and either lands in a balance that never runs out of time. Our guide to buying proxies with crypto lists what each network charges. PayPal is missing from the list on our payment options page.
How many GB does a French job take?
About 380 full desktop pages fit in one GB. HTTP Archive's 2024 Page Weight chapter puts the median desktop page at 2,652 KB and the median mobile page at 2,311 KB. Jobs that skip images and scripts use far less, so weigh twenty of your own target pages first.
Which one should you buy?
Start with Residential Lite and France as the country: $0.50/GB for one GB, $0.44 per GB at volume. Leave free proxies aside, since 42 of 44 were flagged. Move to Residential Premium when the job needs a city, one of the 110 networks or a sticky session of up to 24 hours. Premium costs $1.49/GB for one GB and $1.00 per GB at volume, and our residential proxies page lists every tier.
What this page could not check
- We measured no speed, success rate or block rate, on any network, ours included.
- We do not publish which French networks our own exits come from, or how many there are.
- RIPE NCC's file counts addresses given out, which is neither the addresses in use nor a count of users.
- Seller pool numbers are what each page showed on October 26, 2026. We could not check what each one counts.
- The free proxy figures come from one day and one IP reputation check.
- We will check every number on this page again by January 26, 2027.
Sources
- RIPE NCC, delegated-ripencc-extended-latest, records to October 24, 2026, read October 26, 2026.
- RIPE NCC, RDAP records for the largest French address blocks, read October 26, 2026.
- APNIC Labs, IPv6 use per economy, France, data to October 23, 2026.
- Google Search Help, "Understand and manage your location when you search on Google", read October 25, 2026.
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2024, Page Weight chapter, December 30, 2024.
- MaxMind, GeoIP Anonymous IP database documentation, read October 25, 2026.
- Shifter, Oxylabs, SOAX, Bright Data and DataImpulse, France location pages, as shown on October 26, 2026.
- HProxy, residential pricing page and payment options page, read October 25, 2026, and France page, read October 26, 2026.
- HProxy, free proxy check for France, October 26, 2026.
