Pay for one night in the UFC is built from separate payments that are published in different places, by different people, on different timetables. Set them side by side and the shape of the money is plain: a fee for turning up, a second fee for winning that is usually the same size, and a bonus sheet on which one number appears three times out of four.
A purse is two payments
The figure a state athletic commission publishes is almost never one payment. It is a fee for making the walk, and a second payment that lands only on a win. The commission files the total, and the split is stated alongside it on 1,828 of the 1,898 winning rows we hold. On 128 of those the win bonus is zero: the fighter won, and the contract paid nothing extra for winning. Across the other 1,700 the numbers show a structure rather than a negotiation, because 1,543 of them, nine in ten, are exactly half the purse. A fighter on $500,000 is on $250,000 to show and $250,000 to win, and a defeat pays the first half only.
| Fighter | Event | Purse | To show | Win bonus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tony Ferguson | UFC 216 | $500,000 | $250,000 | $250,000 |
| Georges St-Pierre | UFC 100 | $400,000 | $200,000 | $200,000 |
| Dan Henderson | UFC 100 | $250,000 | $100,000 | $150,000 |
| Fabrício Werdum | UFC 216 | $400,000 | $275,000 | $125,000 |
| Demetrious Johnson | UFC 216 | $370,000 | $370,000 | $0 |
| Brock Lesnar | UFC 100 | $400,000 | $400,000 | $0 |
The bottom two rows are the interesting ones
Demetrious Johnson defended a flyweight title at UFC 216 and Brock Lesnar beat Frank Mir at UFC 100, and both were paid flat: the same money whether they won or lost. There are 128 wins on record where the filing states there was no win bonus at all. They cluster at the top of the card: 105 of the 128 sit in the top quarter of the bill, against 38 in every hundred winning rows overall. That is the half of the card with the leverage to ask for one number instead of two.
The bonus sheet, and the $50,000 that runs through it
Separate from the purse, and published by the promotion rather than filed with anyone, are the awards handed out on the night. We hold an amount for 2,620 of them, $141,941,000 in all. One number does most of the work: 1,962 awards, three in four, are exactly $50,000. Twenty other values appear across the whole set, from $7,500 to $400,000, and almost every one of them sits on a card the promotion had a reason to treat differently.
The twelve values the chart above leaves out
The nine bars above cover 2,549 of the 2,620 awards. The remaining 71 are spread across twelve values, and the top of that list is where the promotion marks an occasion. UFC 300 paid $300,000 four times. A 2026 card paid $400,000 four times, the largest single award on record, twice of it to Justin Gaethje on the same night for two different awards. At the other end, twelve awards were $7,500 and four were $20,000.
| Award | Times paid |
|---|---|
| $400,000 | 4 |
| $300,000 | 4 |
| $200,000 | 1 |
| $160,000 | 4 |
| $129,000 | 4 |
| $85,000 | 4 |
| $80,000 | 4 |
| $55,000 | 12 |
| $35,000 | 4 |
| $25,000 | 14 |
| $20,000 | 4 |
| $7,500 | 12 |
Four awards, and the night two of them became one
For most of the promotion’s history the sheet carried three names: Fight of the Night, Knockout of the Night and Submission of the Night. From UFC Fight Night 36 in February 2014 the last two were retired and replaced by a single Performance of the Night, which can go to a standout showing of any kind. Of the awards we hold, 1,219 are Performance of the Night, 1,069 Fight of the Night, 173 Knockout of the Night and 159 Submission of the Night. Fight of the Night is the one that pays twice over: both fighters take it, winner and loser alike, which is why it is the award a beaten fighter can still leave with.
What is never filed
Three payments sit outside all of this and reach no filing and no press release. Locker-room money handed over on the night. Sponsorship, which since the promotion took its outfitting in-house is paid by the promotion rather than by the brands. And any share of pay-per-view revenue, which only the top of the bill has ever had. We hold none of them, for anybody. A purse total on this site is money paid to fight on a given night, which is a different thing from what a fighter earned that year, and nothing here presents it as the second.
The gate is the building’s money
We hold a gate for 388 cards and an attendance for 438. The gate is what the tickets sold for and it goes to the promotion and the venue, not to the fighters, which is why a card can take eight figures at the door and file a purse sheet in the low millions. UFC 329 took $26,430,566 from 20,078 people at the T-Mobile Arena in July 2026, the largest on record. UFC 216 was in the same building nearly nine years earlier, the card that pays Tony Ferguson his $500,000 in the table above, and it took $678,000 from 10,638. Not quite twice the crowd, and thirty-nine times the money.
| Event | Gate | Attendance |
|---|---|---|
| UFC 329 | $26,430,566 | 20,078 |
| UFC 306 | $21,829,245 | 16,024 |
| UFC 205 | $17,700,000 | 20,427 |
| UFC 229 | $17,188,895 | 20,034 |
| UFC 309 | $16,673,954 | 20,200 |
Where the purse figures stop
A purse is public only where a commission publishes it, and most of the world’s do not. Of the 669 cards in this section, 174 carry a purse sheet and 495 carry only the bonus sheet. Those 495 are not purse pages with a hole in them: the bonus sheet is the whole of what was ever made public for those nights, and it is real money paid to named fighters. The disclosed-purse era is a window rather than a baseline, and it is closing behind us.