The State of Free Proxies — September 2026

Across 591,136 individual liveness checks over the past 7 days, only 28.5% returned a working response. At any given moment just 2.4% of the 59,598 proxies we track are reachable. Free proxies are shared, unstable, and short-lived — fine for a throwaway test, not for anything that has to keep running.

Of the live proxies we could classify, 5 are transparent — transparent proxies forward your real IP in request headers, offering no anonymity at all. 1,038 are elite (no proxy headers) and 72 are anonymous. If you can't verify a free proxy's anonymity, assume it's transparent.

Browse the live lists by country and protocol.

Live proxies average 2626 ms to our echo endpoint, and only 13% respond in under a second. Average uptime across the live set is 33%.

We ingest candidates from public aggregator lists, then validate each one by routing a real HTTP request through it to a first-party echo endpoint, re-checking the pool every 30 minutes. A proxy counts as alive only if it returned a correct response within the timeout on its most recent check; uptime is an exponentially-weighted average of its check history. Country is resolved from the proxy IP via MaxMind GeoLite2. Figures refresh every few hours and cover the trailing 7-day check window. We never route customer traffic through these proxies and never warrant them.

Data as of Sep 11, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC.

Companion measurement: which of the top sites refuse datacenter IPs — the same homepage requested from a datacenter IP and a residential one, publishing only the cases where the two answers differ.