We run a verification engine that pulls from 110 free proxy source lists, checks every address it finds, re-checks the survivors continuously, and archives the ones that die. On 3 August 2026 it had accumulated 110,793,691 verification attempts against 581,763 distinct addresses.
That is a large enough sample to answer a question nobody selling proxy lists wants asked: how much of this actually works?
The short version
359,329 of the 548,994 proxies in our dead archive never completed a single successful check. Not once, ever. They were published on a list, we found them, we checked them, and they never answered. Roughly two thirds of the free proxy universe is addresses that never worked at all.
Finding 1: most free proxies never worked, not even once
The usual framing is that free proxies "stop working". For the majority, there was never a working state to stop from.
The funnel, 581,763 addresses
| Stage | Addresses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Discovered across 110 source lists | 581,763 | 100% |
| Archived as dead | 548,994 | ~94% |
| Of those, never once succeeded | 359,329 | ~62% of all |
| Still in active rotation | 32,769 | ~6% |
| Answered within the last 24 hours | 30,831 | ~5% |
| Passing their most recent check | 3,167 | ~0.5% |
HProxy verification engine, measured 3 August 2026.
The two bottom rows are the ones worth sitting with, and they are not a contradiction.
Finding 2: "working" and "working right now" differ by ten times
30,831 addresses answered a check at some point in the last 24 hours. Only 3,167 passed their most recent one. Both numbers are true simultaneously, and the gap between them explains the entire experience of using a free proxy list.
A free proxy flaps. It answers, then it does not, then it answers again, on a cycle nobody controls. So a list that honestly reports "30,000 working proxies" is reporting the set that worked today, while the set working this second is around a tenth of that. Pull ten addresses off such a list at random and expect roughly one to respond.
This is also why testing matters more than sourcing. Any address you take from any list is a hypothesis until you check it, which is what our free proxy checker is for.
Finding 3: the source you pull from matters enormously
We track which list every address came from. The spread in quality across those 110 sources is far wider than we expected when we started recording it.
Best and worst source lists by live yield
| Source | Contributed | Alive now | Yield |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best performer | 3,229 | 1,298 | 40.2% |
| Second | 2,060 | 788 | 38.3% |
| Third | 4,254 | 972 | 22.9% |
| Median-ish large source | 6,463 | 819 | 12.7% |
| A large low-yield source | 270,235 | 2,462 | 0.91% |
| Another | 222,211 | 1,522 | 0.68% |
| Worst performer | 214,055 | 415 | 0.19% |
HProxy verification engine, measured 3 August 2026.
Read the bottom row again. One source list has published 214,055 addresses over its lifetime. 415 of them are alive. That is a hit rate of roughly one in five hundred, and it is a list people actively use.
Note the inverse relationship in that table. The sources contributing the most addresses tend to have the worst yield, because volume on a free proxy list is produced by scraping other lists rather than by verifying anything. A list of 200,000 addresses is not two hundred times better than a list of 1,000. It is usually a list of 1,000 with a great deal of noise attached, which is the argument we made in the biggest free proxy lists before we had this data to back it.
Finding 4: the ones that do work live about six days
For addresses that succeeded at least once before dying, the median time from first sighting to being archived dead is 145 hours. Call it six days.
That number fits what a free proxy usually is. Almost none are deliberate public services. They are misconfigured servers, forgotten test boxes, and open relays that nobody meant to leave open, so the lifespan of a free proxy is really the time it takes for somebody to notice and close it.
Six days also means any list older than a week is mostly historical. If a list does not tell you when each address was last verified, the freshness is unknowable, and unknowable freshness on a six-day median is not a small problem.
Finding 5: where they are, and what they leak
Among addresses alive in the last 24 hours, the geography is not what most buyers assume. Indonesia leads at 3,187, ahead of the United States at 2,565, India at 2,163 and China at 2,162, then Japan, Australia, South Korea and Hong Kong.
If your job needs a specific Western country, the free pool is thinner than the headline count suggests, because a large share of the pool sits in a handful of Asian markets.
Anonymity is the other half of it. Among the addresses passing their latest check, 1,232 graded elite and 506 graded transparent. A transparent proxy forwards your real IP in the request headers, so the destination site sees the proxy address and yours. Roughly one in seven of the currently-live pool leaks the thing most people are using a proxy to hide. We covered the mechanics of that in are free proxies safe.
What this means if you actually want to use free proxies
- 1
Verify every address yourself, always
Two thirds of published addresses never worked at all. Any list is a set of candidates, not a set of proxies. Check before you use, every time.
- 2
Judge a list by freshness, not by size
The largest source we track has a 0.19% hit rate. If a list does not publish a last-verified timestamp per address, its size tells you nothing useful.
- 3
Expect roughly one in ten to answer at any moment
The gap between alive-today and alive-now is about ten times. Pull more candidates than you need and assume most are asleep.
- 4
Check the anonymity grade before sending anything
A meaningful share of live free proxies are transparent and forward your real IP. Never put credentials or personal data through an unverified one.
- 5
Use free for testing, paid for anything that matters
Free proxies are genuinely useful for confirming a page renders from another country. For work with a deadline, a six-day median lifespan and a 0.5% instantaneous hit rate is not a foundation.
Method
Every figure here comes from our own verification engine on 3 August 2026, not from a third party. The engine pulls from 110 source lists, 97 of them currently enabled, checks each discovered address, re-checks survivors on a rolling schedule, and moves addresses that stop responding into a dead archive rather than deleting them, which is what makes the never-worked-once figure computable at all.
Three definitions, because they carry the whole study:
- Discovered means a distinct ip:port pair our engine has ever recorded, whether it ever answered or not.
- Alive within 24 hours means the address completed at least one successful check in the last day.
- Passing its most recent check means the single latest check on that address succeeded. This is the strictest reading and the one that produces 3,167.
Cumulative checks (110,793,691) counts every verification attempt ever made against every address, live and archived. Our retained per-check history table holds a rolling window rather than all of it, so that total comes from the per-address counters rather than from row-counting the history.
These are measurements of one engine's view of the free proxy world on one day. Another engine pulling different sources would see different numbers, and ours will look different next month. The date is on every figure for that reason.
If you want the practical version of all this rather than the numbers, are free proxies safe covers the risks and how to check if a proxy is working covers verification. Our own continuously re-checked free proxy list is the output of the engine described above, and every address on it carries the time it was last confirmed alive.