Ask a casual fan how MMA fights end and the answer is a knockout. Ask the database and the answer is a decision, by a comfortable margin.
One study of 8,591 UFC bouts running through late March 2026 puts decisions at 46.8% of all outcomes, against 32.6% for KO or TKO and 19.3% for submissions. Finishes account for 51.9%, close enough to a coin flip that treating them as the default is simply wrong.
One more figure from that dataset before the divisions: the average fight lasted 10 minutes 37 seconds, while the median was 13 minutes 48 seconds. A mean sitting three minutes below the median means the distribution is skewed by early stoppages, so anyone reasoning about fight length from the average is describing a fight that mostly does not happen.



