Perhaps you’re considering signing up for the UFC Fight Pass or an ESPN+ subscription to get access to the most mixed martial arts content over the year.
Or maybe you just want to know how many UFC events per year to expect. Well, I’ve done the research for you.
The UFC holds a total of 41 events per year on average. That typically includes 12 PPV and 29 Fight Nights each year.
This is based on an average of the last five years:
| Year | PPV events | Total events |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 12 | 42 |
| 2021 | 13 | 43 |
| 2020 | 11 | 41 |
| 2019 | 11 | 41 |
| 2018 | 13 | 39 |
If you want to learn more about the selection of events the UFC is putting on every year, keep reading.
Table of Contents
UFC events per year
There is an average of 41 UFC events every year, considering the last five years between 2018-2022.
Events might sometimes be called ‘cards’.
I’ve put together an interactive chart that displays the total number of UFC events per year and compares it with both PPV and regular fight nights:
PPV events are considered any numbered UFC event. Fight Nights are any non-numbered UFC event. In the early days of the UFC, most events were numbered PPV events.
The promotion was consistently increasing the number of events each year until 2014 when it took a slight dip but has maintained around 40 events since then.
In 2020, the UFC was forced to cancel five events due to the COVID situation.
It would have been a breakout year with 46 events but they struggled to put on events between March to May of that year due to a lot of uncertainty and lockdowns.
UFC PPV events per year
There is an average of 12 UFC PPV events every year, taking into account the last five years between 2018-2022.
This bar chart shows how the PPV events have grown since the UFC began in 1993:
It seems that the promotion is always aiming to put on the equivalent of one big PPV show for every calendar month of the year.
And this looks to be the sweet spot, as any more than that and there likely wouldn't be enough available high-level fighters to bring the attraction to them.
Any less than that and there probably wouldn't be enough business generated to keep all these fighters working.
UFC fight nights per year
There has been an average of 29 UFC fight night events every year, considering the last five years between 2018-2022.
Here's a handy bar chart that shows the growth of UFC Fight Nights over the years:
I'm grading Fight Nights as events that are not UFC PPV events.
As the UFC has grown in age and size, the number of fight nights has expanded massively.
A huge surge of growth here happened between 2009-2014 and has since leveled out around the 30 mark each year.
How many UFC events have there been ever?
Between 1993-2022, the UFC had a total of 629 events.
Including UFC events in 2023 up until now, August 12th, 2023, there have been a total of 656 broadcasted UFC events.
Neither of these stats are including any scheduled but canceled events, only broadcasted.
How are UFC events numbered?
In the early days of the UFC, there were only a handful of PPV events every year.
During those times, almost every UFC event was numbered e.g. UFC 1-UFC 49.
UFC events are numbered by them being a "main event" and are almost exclusively pay-per-view (PPV) events.
In between these numbered events, there'll be UFC Fight Nights which come in different names when being televised on different networks.
For example, UFC on ESPN, or UFC on Fox.
But it could also be events that are still within the UFC promotion but from their TV show series like The Ultimate Fighter or Dana White's Contender Series.
How often does UFC have fights?
With the data I collected about the past UFC events, you can expect the UFC to have almost an event every single week of the year (but not quite).
The average of UFC events is 41 each year, which when compared to the 52 weeks of the calendar year, it's a frequency of about 0.8.
An easier way to understand it is that there are typically between 3-4 UFC events per calendar month.
Outliers in 2022 were January which only had 2 events, and July which had 5 events.
Final say on number of UFC events per year
To sum up, the stats I've compiled show that the UFC has:
- 41 events per year on average
- 12 PPV events per year on average
- 29 fight night (non-PPV) events per year on average
- 0.8 is the frequency of an event every week of the year
- 629 is the total number of UFC events between 1993-2022
I'll do my best to keep this article up to date for your stat needs, be sure to send any questions or feedback to [email protected]
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