A free anonymous proxy hides your address from the site you visit, but tells the site that a proxy is in the path. It is one of three grades, and the one most people want is the next one up, elite. We looked up the grades of the working free web proxies in our own pool on 28 September 2026 at 17:13 UTC. Of 3,848 on ordinary addresses, 1,673 were elite, 1,222 anonymous and 953 transparent.
This page covers what each grade means, what our pool shows, and what no grade hides.
The three grades
| Grade | Your address | Proxy header | What the site sees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elite | Hidden | None | An ordinary visitor |
| Anonymous | Hidden | Present, such as Via | A proxy, not you |
| Transparent | Passed on, usually in X-Forwarded-For | May be present | You, through a proxy |
A grade comes from the headers a proxy adds to your request. Via, in the words of RFC 9110, "indicates the presence of intermediate protocols and recipients" on the way. RFC 7239 names X-Forwarded-For among "the non-standard header fields" used to pass your IP address on. Our checker grades a proxy from a plain HTTP request to our own echo. Your address in a forwarding header makes it transparent. A proxy header without your address makes it anonymous. Neither makes it elite.
What our pool shows
- The grades. 1,673 of 3,848 working free web proxies on ordinary addresses were elite, 1,222 anonymous and 953 transparent. Counting every entry, 1,030 of 11,665 were transparent, 8.8 percent.
- Where the leaks sit. 740 of the 953 transparent ones were on networks not labelled datacenter. There, 28.0 percent were transparent, against 17.7 percent on datacenter networks.
- The Squid default. On port 3128, the default of Squid, 135 of 334 working web proxies passed your address on. Squid documents "forwarded_for on" as its default: "If set to "on", Squid will append your client's IP address in the HTTP requests it forwards".
- Grades change. We checked 200 listed entries on ordinary addresses again at 17:10 UTC. Of the 89 that answered, 29 came back with another grade. 9 anonymous ones came back elite, 7 elite ones anonymous, 8 transparent ones better, and 5 transparent. A second run at 17:17 UTC found 34 changes among 109, 7 of them to transparent.
What no grade hides
Anonymity is about what the site sees. The operator of the proxy sees more:
- Where you go. Over HTTPS, the proxy opens a tunnel with the CONNECT method, which RFC 9110 limits to "blind forwarding of data". It still learns which site you asked for.
- What you send over plain HTTP. Nothing is encrypted there. In 2015, Christian Haschek tested 443 free proxies, and 33 of the 199 that were online were modifying web pages to inject ads.
- Your HTTPS, if you accept a fake certificate. On 28 September 2026, 211 free SOCKS5 proxies on ordinary addresses finished a TLS handshake with our own site, and 122 of them handed back a certificate that was not ours. Counting every entry, 131 of 711 did. A 2018 study of more than 107,000 listed open proxies found TLS man-in-the-middle attacks. Our guide to whether free proxies are safe has the details.
- The network. A site sees the network of the exit address too. 1,201 of the 3,848 working web proxies on ordinary addresses were labelled datacenter, and 8,991 of 11,665 counting every entry. Headers are only one of the signals covered in how websites detect proxies.
Check the grade yourself
A grade on a list is a snapshot, so test it right before you use it. Request http://httpbin.org/headers through the proxy, over plain HTTP, and look for your own address or a proxy header. How to check if a proxy is working walks through that test and three more. Or paste the proxy into our free proxy checker, with no signup:
# Tests one proxy from our server: alive or dead, protocols, anonymity, latency, country
curl "https://hproxy.com/api/proxy-check?proxy=203.0.113.7:1080"
When a free anonymous proxy is enough
For a look at a public page from another address, an elite or anonymous free proxy can do, as long as you never log in or pay through it and stay on HTTPS. Pick elite when the site should not see a proxy at all, and check the grade first. Our free proxy list filters by grade.
When free is not enough
For web tasks that have to keep running, such as checking your own site from another country, a residential proxy is the better tool. Its address belongs to a home connection, and it stays up while you work. Ours start at $0.44/GB, pay as you go, and purchased traffic has no scheduled expiry date.
The plain answer
A free anonymous proxy hides your address and admits it is a proxy. In our pool on 28 September 2026, more than two in five working web proxies on ordinary addresses were elite. About a third were anonymous, and about one in four transparent. The grade can change within hours, even to transparent, and no grade stops the operator from seeing where you go. Check it, use it for public pages only, and never sign in through one.
How we measured
The grades, the datacenter labels and the port count come from one read-only query of our free proxy pool. It ran from our server in the United States on 28 September 2026 at 17:13 UTC. Each figure leaves out addresses that held 20 or more of the entries it counts. Where the two differ a lot, the figure over every entry stands next to it. The two rechecks each took 200 entries that our list API showed as working at 17:10 and 17:17 UTC. All sat on addresses that held fewer than 20 entries of the list. Our checker checked them again, with 20 seconds per probe. The certificate figures come from our test of every SOCKS5 entry of the list at 15:05 UTC. It ran a TLS handshake with our own site through each one. Grades come from a plain HTTP request through each proxy to our own echo. We store no proxy addresses, and every time is in UTC.
Sources
- IETF, RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics, June 2022, sections 7.6.3 on Via and 9.3.6 on CONNECT.
- IETF, RFC 7239: Forwarded HTTP Extension, June 2014.
- Squid documentation: forwarded_for.
- Christian Haschek, Analyzing 443 free proxies: Only 21% are not shady, 21 June 2015.
- Akshaya Mani, Tavish Vaidya, David Dworken and Micah Sherr, An Extensive Evaluation of the Internet's Open Proxies, arXiv 1806.10258, 27 June 2018.
- HProxy documentation: the proxy checker API, read 28 September 2026.
