Rotating and static residential proxies both put a home-registered IP in front of yours. A rotating proxy hands you a different IP from a shared pool, per request or per sticky session, and bills per gigabyte. A static proxy hands you one IP that stays yours for the plan, and bills per IP per month. We read eight sellers that sell both on October 22, 2026. One static IP for a month cost as much as 0.44 to 2.75 GB of the same seller's rotating traffic. At the median, that was about 1 GB. Above about a gigabyte a month per identity, the static IP is the cheaper way to buy. We sell both kinds, so weigh our view with that in mind.
What is the difference between rotating and static residential proxies?
A rotating residential proxy gives you many identities: each request, or each short session, leaves through a different home IP. A static residential proxy gives you one identity: an IP registered to an internet provider that never changes under you. Sellers often call the static kind an ISP proxy. Price, session behavior and the way each one fails all follow from that split.
How does a rotating residential proxy hand out IPs?
You get one gateway address and a login, never a list of IPs. Settings in the username choose how the exit behaves:
- Per-request rotation: every request leaves through a fresh IP from the pool.
- Sticky session: a session label holds one IP for a set window, then the pool replaces it.
- Targeting: a country, and at some sellers a state, city or network, narrows the part of the pool that serves you.
Sellers document different sticky windows. IPBurger holds a session for up to 30 minutes and Fastproxy for up to 60. NodeMaven and our Residential Premium hold one for up to 24 hours, and our Residential Premium Classic for up to 7 days. Our guide to sticky vs rotating proxy sessions covers the windows in detail.
The pool behind the gateway is large and spread out. In 2019, researchers detected 6 million residential proxy IPs across more than 230 countries and 52,000 ISPs. They also found many of those proxies running on likely compromised hosts, IoT devices among them, whatever the providers claimed. Ask any seller where its pool comes from.
That spread is the point of rotation. Cloudflare defends websites against such traffic, and it names the effect plainly. In its words, "IP address rotation allows attackers to directly bypass traditional defenses such as IP reputation and IP rate limiting". The same property serves honest collection: no single IP carries enough requests to stand out. It also means any one exit can be slow or drop mid-request, because a home line sits behind it. Plan retries into your code from the start.
How does a static residential proxy work?
A static residential proxy is one IP that stays assigned to you for the whole plan. It is registered to an internet provider and usually hosted in a data center. Websites see a provider's network, the server behind it stays online, and the IP never changes under a login. What is an ISP proxy explains the type and its many names.
Sellers price it per IP per month. The traffic terms differ more than the word "unlimited" suggests:
- MarsProxies, Fastproxy and IPOasis list unlimited bandwidth, and Evomi says its static IP has "no data meter".
- Bright Data and ProxyEmpire cap fair use at 100 GB per IP a month.
- Oxylabs offers "unlimited bandwidth with fair usage" without a figure.
The smallest purchase differs too. Bright Data's dedicated plan starts at 10 IPs for $35 a month, and Decodo's at 3 IPs for $9.99. The other six sell a single IP.
Which costs less, rotating or static?
It depends on how much traffic one identity moves. We priced both at eight sellers that print both on their own pages, read October 22, 2026:
| Seller | Static IP, a month | Rotating, per GB |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | $3.50 | $8.00 |
| Oxylabs | $3.00 | $5.00 |
| MarsProxies | $2.99 | $3.99 |
| Decodo | $3.33 | $3.50 |
| ProxyEmpire | $3.50 | $3.50 |
| IPOasis | $3.99 | $2.90 |
| Evomi | $2.50 | $0.99 |
| Fastproxy | $2.75 | $1.00 |
The static column is the price per dedicated IP for one month at the smallest purchase. The rotating column is the price per GB for 10 GB, and Bright Data's is its list price before a coupon. Divide the first by the second and you get the monthly traffic at which both cost the same:
Above that line, one identity is cheaper on a static IP. Below it, rotating wins, and it wins by far when a job needs many identities. Two jobs priced at MarsProxies, whose tiers we read that day, show both sides:
- Ten seller accounts that move 2 GB a month each. Ten static IPs cost $27.80 a month, at $2.78 each. The same 20 GB of rotating traffic costs $74.80, and its IPs change under the logins.
- A crawler that fetches 200,000 pages of about 50 KB in a month. That is 10 GB, or $39.90 of rotating traffic spread across the pool. A thousand static IPs to spread the same load would cost $2,090.
At HProxy, a static ISP IP costs $2.70 a month with unmetered traffic, and five gigabytes of Residential Lite cost $2.50. Both sit on our ISP proxies and residential pricing pages.
Are more people looking for static residential proxies?
Google's own counts say yes. Monthly searches for "static residential proxies" rose from 2,400 in October 2025 to 6,600 in September 2026, with three months at 12,100. Searches for "rotating residential proxies" rose from 1,600 to 4,400 over the same year.
- static residential proxies
- rotating residential proxies
Where does each one fail?
Failure modes decide this choice more often than feature lists.
Rotation fails at persistence
A change of IP in the middle of a session logs you out, empties carts and trips "unusual activity" checks. Some flows must outlast the sticky window: a checkout, a multi-step form, a logged-in crawl. For those flows rotation is the wrong tool, however good the pool.
Rotation hides problems
Bans cost little with rotation, because the next request takes the next IP. A pipeline can run for months while a large share of its requests bounce, and the pool bills that waste as traffic. Log your block rate even when rotation makes it painless.
Static fails at blast radius
One IP is one identity. If it gets flagged, everything running on it is flagged together. Keep one account, or one narrow purpose, per IP.
Static inherits history
A static IP had earlier tenants, and per-IP defenses remember them: Cloudflare counts IP reputation and rate limits among the traditional defenses. Check an IP before you build on it. Our sister project FFraud runs a free IP abuse check. Our proxy checker shows what a website sees when you connect through the IP.
Which one should you buy?
Start from the job. The loser in this comparison is a rotating plan bought to run logged-in accounts. Its IP changes when the sticky window ends. Above about a gigabyte a month per account, it also costs more than a static IP. Walk your job down this list and stop at the first match:
- Does anything log in, hold a cart or keep a session longer than a sticky window? That flow needs static ISP IPs.
- Is it collection across many pages, with light traffic per identity? Use rotating residential, as most web scraping does.
- Both patterns in one project? Split the layers: rotating for collection, static for accounts.
- Heavy traffic through few identities? Static. Divide the plan's monthly price by the seller's rate per GB, as above. Per-IP plans are also where our traffic is unmetered.
- Only learning the mechanics? Start with our free proxy list and our guide to its limits, then buy the shape your real job shows.
What do the terms on pricing pages mean?
- Backconnect proxy: the gateway described above, the usual way rotating residential is delivered.
- Sticky session: rotation held still for a set window. Check how long the window is.
- ISP proxy: the common name for a static residential IP.
- Datacenter proxy: an IP from a hosting network, fast and cheap and easy for sites to spot. It is a separate, cheaper tier for targets that do not check, priced against residential in datacenter vs residential proxies.
- Ports: some sellers meter static plans by simultaneous connections instead of IPs, so compare like with like.
Once the identity question is settled, the protocol (HTTP vs SOCKS5) and the seller are smaller choices. Our datacenter, ISP and residential proxies all speak both.
What this page could not check
- No performance data. We measured no speed, success rate or block rate, for any seller, ours included.
- One identity's view. The break-even compares one identity's traffic. Rotating traffic also buys many IPs, which a static plan does not.
- Eight sellers. Others draw their static prices by script. Bright Data needs 10 IPs and Decodo 3, and Decodo states only "high bandwidth" for dedicated IPs.
- List and sale prices. Bright Data's rotating rate is its list price, and IPOasis shows its rate as a discount.
- Rounded searches. Keyword Planner reports volumes in bands.
- Check by January 22, 2027. Prices, caps and session limits change, so every number here needs a fresh read by then.
Sources
- Bright Data, ISP and residential pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
- Oxylabs, dedicated ISP and residential pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
- MarsProxies, ISP and residential pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
- Decodo, ISP and residential pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
- ProxyEmpire, Evomi and Fastproxy, pricing pages, read October 22, 2026.
- IPOasis, static and dynamic residential pages, read October 22, 2026.
- IPBurger, residential pricing page, and NodeMaven, pricing and ISP pages, read October 22, 2026.
- Cloudflare, "Using machine learning to detect bot attacks that leverage residential proxies", June 24, 2024.
- Xianghang Mi et al., "Resident Evil: Understanding Residential IP Proxy as a Dark Service", IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2019.
- Google Keyword Planner, worldwide monthly searches, October 2025 to September 2026, read October 22, 2026.
- HProxy product pages and price list, read October 22, 2026.
