Do Mobile Proxies Work Better Than Residential?
What the Data Says

Bot traffic made up 53% of all web requests in 2025, and 40% of that was classified malicious, both figures up from the year before (Thales/Imperva, 2026 Bad Bot Report, Apr 29, 2026). Every automated request, whether it's price monitoring, account management, or a research pipeline, now runs through detection systems built on the assumption that it might not be human. That's the backdrop against which "mobile vs residential" actually gets decided: not by which proxy type sounds more legitimate, but by which one gets through the anti-bot layer standing in front of your actual target.

Most articles answering "do mobile proxies work better than residential" pick a side and back into the numbers. This one starts from Proxyway's disclosed-methodology 2026 testing, the same independent benchmark series we've cited across our mobile vs ISP proxies comparison and our breakdown of why mobile proxy IPs get burned, and reports every figure with its source. Where the independent data runs out, we say so instead of filling the gap with a vendor claim.

Quick Comparison

The Number Everyone Wants: Real-Target Success Rate

Proxyway's 2026 benchmark ran both proxy types against the same three real-world targets, Amazon, Google, and Instagram, sending 1,800 requests per target (5,200 total) at one request per second from a single US test server, and scored each attempt against response code, HTML size, and page title (Proxyway, "Proxy Market Research 2026", published May 28, 2026, data collected Mar-Apr 2026). That methodology matters because it's testing what you actually care about: not whether the proxy connects, but whether the target site lets the request through.

The result: mobile proxies scored a 75.26% median success rate, residential scored 74.43%. The best-performing individual providers showed a wider gap, DataImpulse's mobile network hit 85.31% while Byteful's residential network hit 81.23%, but at the median, across all providers tested, the two proxy types are separated by 0.83 percentage points. That is not the decisive win either "mobile is always better" or "residential is always better" marketing claims imply.

Why "99% Success Rate" Claims and This Data Don't Match

If you've seen a mobile or residential proxy provider advertise a 99%+ success rate, that number is real, and it's also answering a different question than "does this get past Amazon's anti-bot system." Proxyway's own infrastructure-level testing, which measures whether a proxy connects and returns a valid response from a generic endpoint rather than a hardened commercial target, put residential's global-pool median at 99.28% (best: 99.93%, Oxylabs) and its US-pool median at 99.12% (best: 99.92%, SOAX) in the same 2026 report. A separate 2025 benchmark of mobile proxy infrastructure found a 99.61% median success rate, with Oxylabs again the top performer at 99.94% (Proxyway, "Proxy Market Research 2025").

Put the infrastructure number next to the real-target number from the section above and the gap is stark: high 90s down to the mid-70s. That drop is the anti-bot layer, not the proxy's connectivity. A proxy that connects perfectly every time can still get its request silently degraded, CAPTCHA-walled, or rejected by the target site's own detection logic. Any comparison that only cites the infrastructure figure, mobile's 99.61% or residential's 99.28%, is technically accurate and practically misleading if the reader is trying to decide which proxy type will actually get through Amazon or Instagram.

Speed: Residential Wins on Real-Target Response Time

The same 2026 real-target test measured response time alongside success rate, and residential came out ahead here without qualification. Residential's median response time against Amazon, Google, and Instagram was 3.21 seconds, with DataImpulse fastest at 2.58 seconds. Mobile's median was 3.67 seconds, with Decodo fastest at 2.71 seconds (Proxyway, Proxy Market Research 2026). That's a real, structural gap: a mobile connection routes through an actual cellular network and is subject to tower congestion and carrier throttling in a way a home broadband connection generally isn't. Separately, vendor-reported figures put mobile 5G latency around 145ms versus roughly 10-50ms for datacenter-hosted connections, though that specific comparison comes from a vendor blog rather than an independent lab, so treat it as directional rather than benchmark-grade (Coronium, "Static Residential IP Proxy vs Residential Proxy", updated Mar 30, 2026).

Pricing: Residential Is Cheaper at Every Tier Tested

Unlike the mobile-vs-ISP pricing comparison, where the two types bill on entirely different units, mobile and residential proxies are both typically priced per GB, which makes this an apples-to-apples comparison. Proxyway's 2026 standardized pricing found residential running $3.75/GB at the 5GB tier, $3.00/GB at 50GB, and $2.25/GB at 500GB. Mobile ran $4.38/GB, $3.50/GB, and $2.48/GB at the same three tiers (Proxyway, Proxy Market Research 2026). Residential is cheaper at every single volume tier tested, by roughly 10-15% depending on tier.

Per-provider pricing on the residential side also spans a wide range depending on how much you buy up front: Decodo runs $3.75/GB at 5GB down to $2.00/GB at 1TB, Oxylabs runs $6.00/GB down to $2.50/GB at the same volumes, and flat-rate providers like DataImpulse ($1.00/GB, 100GB minimum) and Evomi ($0.49/GB, 100GB minimum) undercut the standardized median substantially at higher commitment levels (Proxyway, "The Best Residential Proxies of 2026: Tested & Ranked", Jul 8, 2026). The pricing gap between residential and mobile also isn't new: Proxyway's 2025 report already had residential's 500GB tier down 26% year-over-year to a $2.58/GB median, while mobile's 250GB tier that year sat at a $5/GB median, a different volume tier so not directly comparable to the 2026 figures above, but consistent with the same pattern of residential undercutting mobile.

What the Market Numbers Mean Against a Real Provider's Pricing

Cross-provider medians are useful for spotting a trend, but they don't tell you what you'd actually pay. Here's TorchProxies' own live residential pricing, verified directly against our pricing pages, so you can see where a real provider sits relative to the Proxyway medians above.

TorchProxies' 1,000GB-tier pricing runs from $2.90 to $3.90/GB across the three residential plans, in the same range as the $2.25/GB cross-provider median Proxyway measured at 500GB. Given that residential's real-target success rate (74.43% median) trails mobile's by less than a point, and mobile costs more per GB at every tier tested, a premium-tier residential plan is, on the numbers above, a defensible substitute for the marginal success-rate gain mobile would offer, at a lower price and faster response time.

IP Pool Size: Bigger Numbers, Different Kinds of Bigger

On advertised pool size, residential leads by a wide margin: a 54 million median across tested providers, with Oxylabs advertising the largest at 175 million. Mobile's advertised median is 16 million, with SOAX largest at 33 million (Proxyway, Proxy Market Research 2026). That's a real gap in scale, but advertised figures are the least trustworthy number in this entire comparison, and Proxyway's own testing shows why.

For mobile, a separate benchmark found the real, actively-reachable pool sitting around 1.19 million unique IPs against a 16 million advertised median, a fraction of the headline claim (Proxyway, "11 Best ISP Proxies," Feb 17, 2026). For residential, Proxyway measured Oxylabs specifically, the largest advertised pool in their test, and found 3,241,404 unique IPs surfaced across 3.6 million requests over 21 days. That's a single provider's real figure, not a cross-provider median, so it isn't directly comparable to mobile's median-based number above, but it tells the same underlying story: real active pools run far smaller than the headline claim on the pricing page, for both proxy types.

Why Mobile Has Any Edge at All: The CGNAT Mechanism

Mobile's narrow real-target success-rate advantage traces back to one structural difference: carrier-grade NAT.

Platforms hesitate to hard-block a CGNAT IP because doing so risks locking out real, paying subscribers who happen to share that address, a cost that doesn't apply to blocking a single residential home IP. Cloudflare's own research, built on a classifier trained across more than 200,000 labeled CGNAT IPs, found CGNAT and non-CGNAT IPs carry nearly identical bot-traffic rates (4.8% median for CGNAT versus 4.7% for non-CGNAT), yet CGNAT IPs were still rate-limited roughly three times as often (Cloudflare, "One IP address, many users," Oct 29, 2025). Platforms are aware of the collateral-damage risk and still lean cautious, which is exactly the dynamic that produces mobile's narrow success-rate edge in the data above: not that mobile IPs are cleaner, but that punishing them is riskier for the platform. The mechanics of how that shared carrier pool actually cycles addresses are covered in how mobile proxy IP rotation actually works on carrier networks.

Residential proxies don't get this specific protection. A residential IP is typically tied to one household, not shared across dozens of unrelated subscribers, so a platform blocking it doesn't carry the same collateral-damage calculus. Residential's competitive answer to this is pool depth and active hygiene instead: a large, well-monitored pool with actively rotated, ethically-sourced IPs spreads request volume thin enough that no single address accumulates enough bad-behavior signal to get flagged, a different mechanism aimed at the same outcome. We cover the failure mode on the mobile side, what happens when that CGNAT protection doesn't hold, in our breakdown of why mobile proxy IPs get burned.

What Proxy Buyers Actually Choose, According to Proxyway's Own Surveys

Success-rate percentages are one signal. What buyers actually pay for is another, and it's arguably a stronger one, since it reflects real-world outcomes across many use cases rather than one blended three-site test. In Proxyway's 2025 market survey, all but one participating provider named residential as their primary proxy type, with mobile described as "highly situational" (Proxyway, Proxy Market Research 2025). In the 2026 survey, residential remained the most popular proxy server type among tested providers except two, with e-commerce as the dominant use case and AI-driven, agentic scraping the fastest-growing segment (Proxyway, Proxy Market Research 2026).

That consistency across two survey years is worth weighing against the 0.83-point success-rate edge mobile showed on the specific three-site test above. If mobile decisively outperformed residential in practice, you'd expect the market's own primary-type preference to have shifted toward it by now. It hasn't.

Matching Proxy Type to the Job

Given how close the top-line numbers are, the more useful question usually isn't "which is better" but "which is better for this specific workload."

Verdict: Category Winners

So: do mobile proxies work better than residential? On the one metric where mobile actually wins in independent testing, real-target success rate, the margin is under a point. On every other measured category, response time, price, advertised pool depth, and what the market itself chooses to buy, residential comes out ahead. The honest answer to the title question is that "better" depends entirely on which axis you're optimizing for, and for most workloads, that axis favors residential.

Summary

TorchProxies runs residential and ISP proxy plans today; mobile is on our roadmap but not live yet. Given how close the tested numbers actually are, a premium-tier residential plan covers most of what mobile's marginal success-rate edge would buy you, without the CGNAT pooled-risk tradeoff we cover in why mobile proxy IPs get burned. If your workload genuinely needs carrier-layer legitimacy specifically, TikTok or Instagram automation, SMS-linked verification, factor mobile's current unavailability here into how you evaluate providers. For static, session-persistent workloads, see our mobile vs ISP proxies guide, and for the datacenter side of the picture, our datacenter vs residential benchmarks.