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Conor McGregor hasn’t won a UFC fight since January 2020, and he has almost certainly banked more inside the octagon than any fighter in the promotion’s history. That contradiction sits at the centre of any serious conversation about the highest-paid UFC fighters. The names at the top are not always the ones holding belts, and the numbers that get published are rarely the numbers that land in a bank account.
Here is how the pay actually stacks up, who is really cashing the biggest checks, and why the gap between the superstars and the rest of the roster keeps widening.
The Published Purses Are Only Half the Story
When a UFC event finishes, the athletic commission that sanctioned it releases a purse sheet. Those figures, usually show money plus a win bonus, are what most “highest-paid” lists get built on. They are also frequently misleading.
At UFC 229 in 2018, the Nevada commission listed Khabib Nurmagomedov at $2 million and McGregor at $3 million. Both men walked away with considerably more. Pay-per-view points, discretionary bonuses and endorsement money appear nowhere on that sheet, and no commission has ever asked the UFC to disclose them.
The result is a sport where the genuinely reliable figures are the ones nobody publishes, and the public numbers are the floor rather than the ceiling.
The Highest-Paid UFC Fighters of All Time
Conor McGregor
The Dubliner is the outlier in every category. His disclosed purse for UFC 264 against Dustin Poirier was $5 million, and that was before a pay-per-view share that reportedly added several times that amount. Forbes named him the world’s highest-paid athlete in 2021 with $180 million for the year, the bulk of it from selling his Proper No. Twelve whiskey brand to Proximo Spirits. His lifetime UFC earnings are estimated well north of $200 million, and he has headlined five of the ten biggest pay-per-view cards in company history.
Khabib Nurmagomedov
Nurmagomedov retired at 29-0 in 2020, but he packed extraordinary earnings into a short run. UFC 229 reportedly pushed his take-home past $10 million once his PPV cut was counted, and his 2019 title defence in Abu Dhabi was another multi-million-dollar night. Few fighters have earned more per appearance.
Jon Jones
For most of his light-heavyweight reign, Jones was underpaid relative to his dominance, a grievance he aired publicly for years. The move to heavyweight in 2023 reset the maths. He reportedly cleared $3 million for UFC 285 and something closer to $6 million for the Stipe Miocic fight at UFC 309, with PPV points doing much of the heavy lifting.
Alex Pereira
Pereira’s climb is the fastest on this list. Three years ago he was earning kickboxing purses; by UFC 300 he was reportedly banking around $2.9 million in a single night, and UFC 303 pushed him past $3 million. He fights often, sells tickets and headlines cards, which is exactly the combination the UFC rewards.
Israel Adesanya
Two title reigns and a run of blockbuster main events made Adesanya one of the promotion’s most consistent seven-figure earners. His kickboxing rivalry with Pereira turned into one of the best-selling pay-per-views of the modern era.
Brock Lesnar and Ronda Rousey
Neither needed a long UFC résumé to change the economics. Lesnar’s disclosed purse at UFC 200 was $2.5 million and Rousey’s at UFC 207 was $3 million, both enormous for their era. They proved that crossover stars, not just champions, drive the revenue that funds everyone else’s contracts.
How a UFC Contract Actually Pays Out
- Show money: the guaranteed purse, paid whether the fighter wins or loses.
- Win money: typically an equal sum on top, which is why a defeat can halve a fighter’s night.
- Pay-per-view points: a contractual slice of buys, offered to a handful of headliners and almost never to anyone on the prelims.
- Performance bonuses: historically $50,000 for Fight of the Night and Performance of the Night, occasionally raised on marquee cards.
- Sponsorship and kit revenue: a share of the UFC’s outfitting deal plus approved individual sponsors, capped by the promotion’s rules.
- Outside endorsements: the real money for the top one percent, and entirely outside the UFC’s remit.
PPV Points Are the Real Dividing Line
Strip everything else away and UFC pay comes down to one question: does your contract include a cut of the pay-per-view? A ranked contender on a $60,000 show purse might earn $120,000 for a win. A headliner with points on a card that sells 800,000 buys earns more in one night than that contender will see in a decade.
Critics of the model point out that the UFC distributes roughly 20 percent of its revenue to fighters, compared with around 50 percent in the NFL, NBA and MLB. Defenders counter that MMA has no guaranteed league-wide salary, no collective bargaining agreement, and that a fighter who sells is a fighter who gets paid. Both things are true at once, and the argument has been running for a decade.
Who Is Climbing Right Now
Islam Makhachev has moved from undercard anonymity to headlining cards in the Gulf, where the UFC’s Abu Dhabi partnership turns championship fights into lucrative events. Tom Aspinall holds a heavyweight title and the leverage that comes with it, and has been open about wanting to be paid like the division’s figurehead. Sean O’Malley built a comparable pay-per-view audience to fighters with twice his tenure. Kayla Harrison arrived from the PFL on a deal that reportedly made her one of the best-paid women on the roster before she had thrown a UFC punch.
The Hollywood Paycheck
For the biggest names, the cage is only part of the income statement. McGregor co-starred alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House, Ronda Rousey appeared in Furious 7, and Georges St-Pierre played a memorable villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Fighting gives athletes a recognisable face and a narrative, and Hollywood has learned to use both, as this look at sports stars who became actors shows in detail. Those acting fees rarely show up in any MMA earnings estimate, and for a handful of fighters they now dwarf the purses.
Where Fighter Pay Goes Next
Francis Ngannou’s exit is the number every UFC negotiator now has to answer for. He left as heavyweight champion in 2023, signed with the PFL, and then earned a reported $30 million across boxing matches with Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. No UFC heavyweight had ever seen money like that, and every current champion knows it.
Add the promotion’s new U.S. broadcast agreement, reportedly worth more than $7 billion across its term, and the pressure to raise purses only grows. Revenue is climbing, the roster is deeper than it has ever been, and the fighters’ share of the pie has become the sport’s most persistent argument. Expect the names on this list to keep changing, and expect the numbers next to them to keep getting bigger.
