UFC Finish Rate and Duration by Weight Class, 1994–2026

Heavier Divisions Finish More Fights, and Finish Them Sooner

The pooled finish rate for a class is all its finishes divided by all its fights. Heavyweight sits at 66.0% over 788 fights and Flyweight at 45.3% over 430. Ranking the eight men's classes from lightest to heaviest and comparing that order with their finish rates gives a Spearman rank correlation of 0.98; the same order against average fight length gives −0.98. In plain terms, the heavier the division, the more finishes and the shorter the fights, with one exception.

The only break in the order: Lightweight (51.7%) edges Welterweight (51.6%). Restricting to 2016–2025 the rank correlation is 0.88, with Heavyweight at 59.3% and Flyweight at 46.9%, so the pattern is not an artefact of the 1990s.

The women's classes all finish less often than any men's class: from 34.0% in Women's Strawweight (379 fights) to 43.3% in Women's Featherweight (30 fights). The 1990s Open Weight bouts finished 90.6% of the time and averaged 4.5 minutes, under different round rules. Among the 179 class-years with at least 20 fights, the highest single rate is Open Weight 1994 at 100.0% and the lowest is Women's Flyweight 2024 at 20.7%.

Pooled Finish Rate by Weight Class

One dot per weight class, all years pooled; men's classes listed heaviest to lightest, then women's, then legacy and catch-weight bouts. Super Heavyweight is a single fight. Hover a dot for the value.

Finish Rate and Duration by Weight Class and Year

Only class-years with at least one fight are listed; a missing pair means no fights in that class that year, not a zero rate. Duration assumes five-minute rounds.

Download the full table (CSV) · 258 rows

How the Numbers Were Made

Source and counting. Every bout on UFCSTATS.com's 788 completed-event pages (retrieved 2026-09-13) was grouped by the weight class printed on the card and the calendar year of the event. A finish is a KO/TKO or submission; decisions, disqualifications, no contests and overturned results count in the fights column but not in finishes. Elapsed time is (round − 1) × 300 seconds plus the clock time of the stoppage or, for a decision, the end of the final round. The 8,885 fights equal the bout rows on those event pages.

The finding. Pooled rates divide a class's total finishes by its total fights across all years; pooled durations weight each class-year's average by its fight count. The rank correlation is Spearman's rho between the men's classes in weight order (Flyweight first, Heavyweight eighth) and their pooled rate or duration; +1 would mean the order matches exactly. The 2016–2025 check repeats it on those years only.

What it does not show. The five-minute-round assumption is wrong for a handful of 1990s tournament bouts with non-standard rounds, so Open Weight and Super Heavyweight durations are indicative. Class-years with no fights are absent rather than listed at zero, because a class that did not exist yet cannot be told apart from one that was idle.

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