UFC Fight Outcomes by Method and Year, 1994–2026

Decisions Went From Rare to the Most Common Outcome

In 1994 none of the 31 fights went to a decision; in 2025 49.2% did, and the peak full year was 2024 at 54.4%. A straight line fitted through the 32 full years rises 13.3 percentage points per decade and explains 76% of the year-to-year variation, so the rise is steady rather than a single jump.

Pooling the fights in each half of the record makes the same point without a model: 31.0% of the 1,265 fights from 1994 to 2009 were decisions, against 49.2% of the 7,229 fights from 2010 to 2025, a gap of 18.2 points. Submissions moved the other way, from 27.7% to 18.0%, while KO/TKO went from 40.2% to 31.3%.

The early years are small samples: 1994 had 31 fights and 64.5% of them ended by submission. The partial 2026 sits at 44.2% decisions across 391 fights.

Share of Fights by Outcome, Year by Year

One line per outcome, each point a calendar year's share of that year's fights. Disqualifications, no contests, overturned results and other rulings are in the table but not drawn. 2026 is January 1 to September 12 only. Hover a point for the value.

Fight Outcomes by Method and Year

Share = fights ending by this method divided by all fights that year. A zero is a counted zero, not missing data.

Download the full table (CSV) · 231 rows

How the Numbers Were Made

Source and counting. Every bout listed on UFCSTATS.com's 788 completed-event pages (retrieved 2026-09-13) was assigned to the calendar year of its event date and to one of seven outcome categories from the site's method code: KO/TKO, Submission, Decision (unanimous, split and majority combined), Disqualification, No Contest, Overturned and Other. Every year x method pair is listed, including zeros. The 8,885 fights in the table equal the number of bout rows on those event pages.

The finding. The pooled share for a method is its fights divided by all fights in the period, times 100. The trend is an ordinary least-squares line through the Decision share of each full year 1994–2025; the era comparison pools 1994–2009 against 2010–2025.

What it does not show. No Contest and Overturned results are kept as the site labels them, not folded back into the in-cage result. Weight class, title status and the round of a finish are on the companion tables, not here.

Coverage. UFCSTATS.com's own completed-events index starts at UFC 2 (March 11, 1994); UFC 1 (November 12, 1993) is not in it, so the table runs 1994 to 2026 rather than 1993 to 2026. 2026 is a partial year: it covers January 1 to September 12, 2026, the retrieval date. Every 1994 to 2025 row is a full calendar year.

Licence. UFCSTATS.com states no licence for its statistics pages. The table republishes counts and shares derived from those pages, names the site as the source, and links to it. Anyone reusing the figures under terms that need an explicit licence grant should check with the publisher first.

Sources

1. UFCSTATS.com completed events index and event-details pagesprimaryUFCSTATS.com · primary · retrieved 2026-09-13 · No stated licence; public official statistics site (checked 2026-09-13) — 788 events, UFC 2 (1994-03-11) to 2026-09-12; weight class, method, round, time and title-bout flag read from each event page