Finding out UFC fighter salaries is more difficult than ever before

Interested to know the reported payouts of UFC fighters after an event? This graph shows that.

Fighter pay remains one of the biggest issues concerning the UFC today. One thing that has changed significantly is the frequency of reported payouts for fighters on a per-event basis. Check out this graph from former Bloody Elbow editor Mike Fagan:

Here are the specific percentage totals by year (rounded to the nearest thousandth):

2003 – 52.94%
2004 – 82.05%
2005 – 80%
2006 – 93.67%
2007 – 73.68%
2008 – 53.73%
2009 – 48.37%
2010 – 54.94%
2011 – 47.67%
2012 – 42.52%
2013 – 39.12%
2014 – 33.6%
2015 – 35.31%
2016 – 43.2%
2017 – 28.01%

To add to this, only 11 of the UFC’s 39 events in 2017 had released payouts, compared to 18 of 41 back in 2016. As Fagan also notes, “pay was not disclosed for any of the 16 fights at women’s bantamweight.”

The percentage of fights with payouts made public decreased each year from 2011-2014, and perhaps not coincidentally, the UFC spread its wings a bit and increased their number of fight cards, and went to regions they’d previously never visited. When 2014 dipped to 33.6%, the UFC ran a whopping 46 events, including multiple

What’s behind the lack of info on fighter purses? It’s twofold. Some states require fighter salaries to be disclosed, such as California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona, while others like New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Colorado do not. When the UFC goes outside the United States, those events never have reported payouts, and there’s certainly been a drastic increase in international cards.

From the boxing side, when Gennady Golovkin fought David Lemieux at Madison Square Garden, ESPN’s Dan Rafael released the purse info of the pay-per-view fighters, but those are typically through the promoters. The UFC certainly does not operate that way.

You can view this as the effect of the UFC’s long-planned “world domination” as they look to spread events around the country and all over the globe, or take the cynical approach and say it’s deliberate on the UFC’s part so that we know less about fighter salaries.

Either way, don’t expect 2018 to be much different from 2017. Of the nine UFC events scheduled from January-March 2018, starting with last week’s UFC Fight Night in Missouri, only three will be held in states that release salary info – UFC 220 (Massachusetts), UFC on FOX 28 (Florida), and UFC 222 (Nevada).