Go inside the numbers of the UFC’s 2023 bonus winners.
Total post-fight bonus awards
In 43 events in 2023, the UFC handed out 190 total post-fight bonus awards of $50,000 each. That led to a grand total of $9.5 million in disclosed bonus payouts for the calendar year.
Of those 190 bonus checks, 58 were for the 29 separate Fight of the Night winners. The other 132 were individual Performance of the Night bonuses.
Fight of the Night vs. Performance of the Night
On average, the UFC hands out four bonus checks per event (4.4 or so was the actual average for 2023). Typically, that means a Fight of the Night bonus that is awarded to both winner and loser of the bout itself, plus two Performance of the Night bonuses.
There’s no hard and fast rule, though, that says there has to be a Fight of the Night. Sometimes, that opens the door for a couple additional individual winners.
There were 14 events out of 43 in 2023 that featured no Fight of the Night winner, but four or more individual Performance of the Night bonuses were handed out instead of two on those occasions.
Extra mile
On nine different occasions in 2023, the UFC gave out more than four bonuses. The leader of the pack of those instances was UFC on ESPN 52 earlier this month. All eight fighters with finishes on that card in Austin, Texas, got bonuses, and there was a Fight of the Night winner, too, for a total of 10 extra $50,000 checks.
Multiple winners
The UFC had 25 different fighters win more than one bonus in 2023, and Diego Lopes won an extra $50,000 in all three of his 2023 bouts.
- Brendan Allen
- Jailton Almeida
- Tom Aspinall
- Edson Barboza
- Viacheslav Borshchev
- Elves Brener
- Jack Della Maddalena
- Josh Emmett
- Justin Gaethje
- Bobby Green
- Roman Kopylov
- Diego Lopes (3)
- Mike Malott
- Marcus McGhee
- Hyun-sung Park
- Trevor Peek
- Vitor Petrino
- Daniel PIneda
- Khalil Rountree
- Nazim Sadykhov
- Benoît Saint-Denis
- Mayra Bueno Silva
- Sean Strickland
- Tatiana Suarez
- Junior Tafa
Women vs. Men
Men outpaced women bonus winners 167-22 in 2023. That there are a lot more men makes sense. The UFC put on 94 women’s fights in 2023, which is 18 percent of the UFC’s full total.
But women made up only about 11.5 percent of the total bonus payouts, and only two won multiple bonuses in 2023 – Mayra Bueno Silva and Tatiana Suarez.
Main card vs. Prelims
Even though preliminary card fights make up roughly 60 percent of the UFC’s total bouts, 2023 bonus winners outpaced their counterparts from the prelims at a factor of about 2:1. Does that have to do with bigger names fighting on the main card, or perhaps recency bias at the end of the night and a quicker remembrance of the fights that happened on the main card? It’s hard to say definitively, and it could be just the way the cookie happened to crumble this year. But there’s no changing the math: Main card winners represented about two-thirds of all 2023 UFC bonuses.
Going the distance
There were three times in 2023 when a Performance of the Night winner came from a decision win and not a finish: Sean Strickland over Israel Adesanya at UFC 293 to win the middleweight title in one of the year’s biggest upsets, Zhang Weili over Amanda Lemos in a successful women’s strawweight title defense at UFC 292, and Stephen Erceg over David Dvorak at UFC 289 in a fight he took on less than two weeks’ notice for his UFC debut.
