It’s a great day to be a UFC fan.
Earlier on Monday (Aug. 11, 2025), news of the $7.7 billion dollar deal with Paramount CBS broke. The promotion and all 43 of their annual events will migrate away from ESPN to Paramount beginning in 2026 and remain there for the next seven years. That $7.7 billion dollars breaks down to $1.1 billion dollars per year, effectively doubling the $550 million per year UFC was getting from ESPN, so TKO executives are surely thrilled with the increased guaranteed money.
The death of the pay-per-view (PPV) model is great news. Between the cost of monthly ESPN+ and the $80 PPV charges, being a UFC fan has been exorbitantly expensive in recent years. It’s no surprise that UFC was struggling to sell many of them, particularly when relatively few stars are available. For fight fans, a single monthly charge on the line with other streaming services is a vast improvement.
A win-win for the UFC organization and fans … but what about the fighters?
Time and time again, we see incredible financial news from the UFC or its parent companies. Every earnings report is better than the last. A new sponsor is handing the company a boatload of money to be the Official Sitting Stool Of The Octagon. Some random country like Azerbaijan pays a gigantic “site fee” for the honor of hosting a mediocre “Fight Night” event. Ticket prices for live events are astronomically higher than they were a decade ago.
How much of that money will the athletes see is always a question worth asking. There is no exact number available, but experts estimate that fighter pay amounts to about 16-18% of that ever-growing revenue. As mentioned, the promotion is now receiving DOUBLE the money from their broadcast partner, so can we expect that influx of cash to trickle down?
It’s a hard question to answer, and it will remain so until new contract details start to emerge. At a bare minimum, I would like to see fighter pay improvements in three places: starting contracts, fight bonuses, and PPV points.
A great deal of UFC’s recent cost-cutting measures have involved replacing established talent with young Contenders Series products. That first contract after Contenders Series sucks. Fighters are still making $10k to show and $10k to win in 2025, and those figures only bump by a couple grand with each subsequent fight. It’s a pittance, and a lot of those athletes will be cut before they receive a second contract.
If they’re good enough to fill out 43 events that are worth $1.1 billion, the promotion can afford to bump those numbers. Nobody tunes in for Contenders Series newbies alone, but UFC quite literally cannot fill cards without them anymore!
It’s a little embarrassing that the UFC is still handing out $50k performance bonuses, a number that was standardized around 2012. In the 13 years or so since, the promotion’s revenue has grown massively (as discussed) and inflation has ravaged the value of FIFTY Gs BABY! A modern equivalent of 2012 $50k would be roughly $70k, so let’s AT LEAST hit that mark.
Finally, PPV points were the historic reward for becoming UFC champion and/or a major star. Fighters who moved a ton of PPV buys were rewarded on a growing scale that could equate to an additional six or seven figure payout on top of their usual purse. With the death of the PPV model, one hopes UFC will reward its star athletes similarly based on some other metric like total views or new subscriptions.
There’s a lot to be optimistic about in regards to the new Paramount deal, which seems like a massive improvement for fight fans. Regarding the athletes, the actual cogs that keep the promotional machine running, it’s much harder to maintain that sunny outlook when so much recent history has shown us UFC CEO Dana White would rather keep them poor and hungry.
