A residential IP address is a public internet address that a home internet provider assigns to a customer's connection. Comcast and Deutsche Telekom are two such providers. Websites see it whenever you browse from home. The label comes from IP databases, which file every address under the network that owns it. A home provider's network sits under the type internet service provider.
Home providers and cloud companies hold blocks of the same size. On October 21, 2026, Comcast's main network announced 68.2 million IPv4 addresses and Microsoft's announced 81.1 million, according to RIPEstat routing data. What sets them apart is the business of the owner.
What makes an IP address residential?
The label comes from a database. IP2Location keeps a usage type, which it defines as a "classification of ISP or company". Its codes include ISP for "Fixed Line ISP" and MOB for "Mobile ISP". Data centers get DCH, for "Data Center/Web Hosting/Transit" (IP2Location).
IPinfo works the same way, its API guide says. It gives each network "the type of organization that owns the ASN". The types are isp, hosting, business, education and government. An ASN is the number of a network on the internet, and every public address belongs to one.
A residential IP is thus one whose network belongs to a consumer provider. Spur, a company that sells data to detect VPNs and residential proxies, draws the same line. It says residential links run "through consumer devices and physical locations like homes and offices".
Why does a home IP address change?
A provider can hand addresses to its customers' routers with DHCP. The standard behind it, RFC 2131, describes three ways to hand one out. In "dynamic allocation", DHCP lends an address "for a limited period of time". In "automatic allocation", it gives a "permanent IP address".
A dynamic address can thus change when its lease runs out. Each provider sets its own lease time, so no single rule says how often that happens. A static residential IP is one that stays the same.
In the proxy market, "static residential" usually means something narrower: an ISP proxy. Spur calls these IPs that "appear residential but are hosted in data center environments". Our guide to ISP proxies explains how they work.
Can several homes share one IP address?
Yes. A provider can put many customers behind one public address with carrier-grade NAT. In April 2012, the IETF reserved address space for exactly this (RFC 6598). It named the block "Shared Address Space to accommodate the needs of Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) devices".
Cloudflare wrote about the effect in 2024. On mobile networks, it wrote, "many users share their IPs behind CGNATs", so blocking one such address can lock out many real people.
Who holds residential IP addresses?
Each bar counts the IPv4 addresses that one network announced to the internet's routing system on October 21, 2026. RIPEstat, the data service of the regional internet registry RIPE NCC, reports them from its route collectors (RIPEstat). Large companies run several networks, so a whole company can hold more than its bar shows.
The types in the notes come from ipinfo's page for each network. Five internet providers and T-Mobile US carry the type ISP, and Microsoft and Google carry the type hosting. T-Mobile is a phone carrier, but ipinfo has no mobile type, so it files the carrier with the internet providers.
How is a residential IP different from a data center or mobile IP?
| Owner | IP2Location | IPinfo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | home provider | ISP | isp |
| Data center | hosting or cloud | DCH | hosting |
| Mobile | phone carrier | MOB | isp |
The owner decides the label. Spur files VPNs and ISP proxies as "typically hosted in data centers", apart from residential connections, and sells that sorting to websites.
Mobile addresses sit in their own class at IP2Location. Many of them are also shared behind one public IP, as the section above shows.
How can you tell whether an IP is residential?
Look up the network that owns it. An IP database gives the owner and its type, and a lookup by AS number shows how big that network is. Our guide on checking whether an IP is residential walks through the lookups step by step.
Keep two limits in mind. Database labels differ between vendors, since each one sorts networks by its own rules. A residential label also names the owner of the network. It says nothing about who uses a given address at a given moment.
Why do websites care?
Websites buy data that sorts IPs by type. Spur sells "tools and data to detect VPNs, residential proxies, and bots" to companies that want to tell visitors apart (Spur Docs).
A residential label alone rarely settles anything, though. Cloudflare measured this in 2024 (Cloudflare). Of the requests from IPs in residential proxy networks, "4 out of 5" came from the households themselves. Blocking those IPs would hit real people, so the IP is one signal among several.
What does a website learn from your residential IP?
More than the type. IP2Location names its DB23 product after the fields it returns for an IP. They are country, region, city, latitude and longitude, ISP, domain, mobile carrier and usage type. A site that looks up your home address can see your provider and a likely city, without you typing anything.
A proxy or a VPN swaps in a different address, so the lookup returns that address's owner and place instead. Everything else you send, such as cookies and logins, still travels with your traffic.
Can someone else use your residential IP address?
Yes, through software on your own devices. Google described in January 2026 how a residential proxy network recruited home devices. A proxy kit hidden in an app does the work. In Google's words, "it will turn the device it is running on into an exit node for the proxy network".
Google found over 600 Android apps with code that connected to that network, and many "did not disclose that they enrolled devices". Cloudflare named the same two channels in 2024: free VPN apps, and proxy kits inside "popular browser extensions and mobile applications".
An exit node carries strangers' traffic out through your home address. If you install apps that pay for spare bandwidth, or free VPNs, read their terms first. Our guide on where residential proxy IPs come from covers each channel.
How do you get a residential IP somewhere else?
Your home connection already has one. For an address in another city or country, three products exist:
- Residential proxies send each request out through a home connection in the place you pick. Ours start at $0.50/GB for one GB on residential proxies.
- A static ISP proxy gives you one fixed address on a consumer provider's network, hosted in a data center. Ours costs $2.70/IP a month on static ISP proxies.
- A residential VPN puts your whole device behind one home address. Our comparison of residential VPNs and residential proxies lists the sellers and their prices.
What this page could not check
- We counted IPv4 addresses only, for one main network per company, from one RIPEstat snapshot. IPv6 is left out.
- Amazon's network did not answer our query in time, so it is missing from the chart.
- We read the label definitions of two IP databases. We did not test how either labels any single address.
- Address blocks move between owners. We will check these numbers again by January 22, 2027.
Sources
- IETF, RFC 2131, "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", March 1997.
- IETF, RFC 6598, "IANA-Reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space", April 2012.
- IP2Location, DB23 database documentation, usage type field, read October 22, 2026.
- IPinfo, ASN API documentation and the public pages of eight networks, read October 22, 2026.
- RIPE NCC, RIPEstat Routing Status, documentation and data for ten networks, collected October 21, 2026, 16:00 UTC.
- Spur, "What is the difference between a VPN, residential proxy, and ISP proxy?", updated September 16, 2026, and Spur Docs home page, read October 22, 2026.
- Cloudflare, "Using machine learning to detect bot attacks that leverage residential proxies", June 24, 2024.
- Google Threat Intelligence Group, "Disrupting the World's Largest Residential Proxy Network", January 28, 2026.
