What changed
SOCKS5 on port 1080 now accepts UDP relay requests (UDP ASSOCIATE) and carries UDP packets to destination ports 443 and 53. QUIC and HTTP/3 connections to websites, and DNS lookups, now go through the same proxy as your TCP traffic.
HTTP and HTTPS proxies stay TCP-only. That is how HTTP CONNECT works with every provider: it opens a TCP tunnel and has no way to carry UDP.
Who gets it
UDP over SOCKS5 is included at no extra cost on every paid Unlimited Bandwidth plan and every traffic pack. It is not available on the Free trial or on Datacenter IPv6.
There is nothing to change in your settings: same host, same port, same username and password. Sticky sessions keep one exit IP for TCP and UDP together.
Limits worth knowing
UDP goes to destination ports 443 and 53 only. Each service can hold up to 256 UDP connections, and a UDP connection closes after 60 seconds without traffic.
Keep packets at 1,400 bytes or less. Larger packets do not get through the residential path.
UDP traffic counts toward your traffic like TCP does, including the small SOCKS5 header on every packet.
Residential exits can drop some packets at very high packet rates. QUIC retransmits lost packets.
How to try it
Use any client that supports SOCKS5 with UDP. In Python, PySocks can send UDP through a SOCKS5 proxy, and most SOCKS5 libraries for Go, Rust and Node expose UDP ASSOCIATE. Chrome and Firefox do not send QUIC through a SOCKS5 proxy; they fall back to HTTP/2 over TCP, so the gain today is for your own tools, DNS lookups and HTTP/3 clients that implement SOCKS5 UDP.
The dashboard shows a hint under SOCKS5 on the service page. The proxy protocols documentation covers SOCKS5 connection settings.