Every UFC title reign · 1997–2026
UFC Championship Stats
Every UFC championship reign measured from its dates: who held a belt longest, which divisions change hands fastest, and how the belt actually gets taken.
ANDERSON SILVA · MIDDLEWEIGHT · 2,457 DAYS
One bar per reign, placed by the date it began · bar height rises with reign length, compressed so short reigns stay visible · 12 still running · 2 of unknown length (no recorded end date). Tap the chart to read a reign. One pixel here is about a month, so where two reigns began that close the caption names both — tap again to step between them.
01 · The board
Who holds them right now
Days held
Not division belts
11 of 12 division belts have an undisputed champion today. Days held run to 4 Oct 2026 and are computed from the start date. Square pips are defences — a count, not a magnitude.
02 · Uptime
Twenty-nine years, one axis
Twelve belts on one shared timeline. A young division simply starts partway across. Hatching is the belt sitting vacant — nothing was happening there. Tap any division name to open that belt's champions on the full reign timeline.
The lightweight belt sat vacant for 1,666 days — 4.6 years — in one unbroken gap.
Vacancies are read from the 23 recorded vacancy rows, not inferred from gaps between reigns. Turnover is reigns divided by the years the division has existed. Rows in grey are gated: Women's Flyweight (n=5), Women's Featherweight (n=3) and Featherweight (n=7) have too few reigns to rank against the rest, so they are shown but not ranked.
03 · Dynasties
The shape of a great career
Days as champion counted once each, the bar broken into its individual reigns at true scale. One unbroken slab, three chunks, or four slivers — the shape is the story.
First belt A second division's belt
Years as champion
Undisputed division reigns only, grouped by name so spelling drift in the records cannot split a career in two. Interim and BMF reigns are excluded.
04 · Dominance or longevity
Career defences against one great run
Where the two marks fuse into one, every defence came inside a single reign. Where they pull apart, the total was assembled across several.
Best single reign Career total
Defences
Defence counts are read from reign rows only — all 41 vacancy rows carry a NULL defence count and never enter a total or an average. Top 12 of 67 champions with at least one defence.
05 · The eras
Four decades, four different sports
Average length of a completed reign. The rule’s length is the number.
1990s
463 days
2000s
500 days
2010s
679 days
2020s
408 days
Plus 11 reigns still running — not yet measured.
Completed undisputed division reigns only. A reign that has not ended cannot have an average length, so the current champions are held out of the bars entirely rather than counted short — which is what makes the 2020s look like a collapse until you see how much of it has not finished being measured.
06 · The handover
How the belt actually changes hands
Round by round, and then against every other fight the promotion has run.
Finish Decision
51 of the 59 round-five handovers are scorecards, not late finishes. Splitting that column is the difference between a fact and a myth.
KO/TKO Submission Decision
Five rounds. More knockouts.
Title fights are longer and are supposed to be safer for the champion. They are knocked out 6.8 points more often than every other fight on record.
KO share of title changes, by division
Too few to rank
Method and round are drawn on the 149 of 178 reigns that have a linked title-winning fight. The 13 interim-to-undisputed promotions are bookkeeping rows with no title-change fight by design, so they cannot appear here. Divisions under n=8 are shown greyed with their n printed rather than ranked or dropped — a 0% knockout rate off four fights is not a fact about a division.
07 · The duel
Put two of them against each other
Five measures, one spine. Every bar is scaled to the pair, so the winner always fills its half and the gap is the whole point.
5–0 JON JONES
Wins run right, losses run left. Top line is Jon Jones, bottom line is Amanda Nunes. In every row below, Jon Jones takes the left half.
Axis runs 23 to 44. Younger is not “more”, so this row is a position, not a bar.
Title-fight records are matched to the fight archive on fighter names, which are spelled differently in places — a champion with no recorded title bouts shows a dash rather than a zero. Days, defences and reigns come from the reign records (110 champions with at least one measurable undisputed division reign).
08 · Never beaten for it
17 champions no one took the belt from
Their reigns ended on paper: vacated, retired, or stripped. Nobody beat them for it.
- Jon Jones 2,984d
- Khabib Nurmagomedov 1,077d
- Henry Cejudo 925d
- Conor McGregor 861d
- Frank Shamrock 703d
- Francis Ngannou 658d
- Tom Aspinall 450d
- Sean Sherk 420d
- Frank Mir 419d
- Jens Pulver 393d
- Charles Oliveira 357d
- Nicco Montaño 280d
- Murilo Bustamante 267d
- Jamahal Hill 174d
- Jiří Procházka 164d
- Germaine de Randamie 128d
- Josh Barnett 126d
41.6%
of completed reigns ended without a single defence — 57 of 137.
The fifteen shortest reigns
Each bar against the average completed reign — 547 days
Right edge = 547 days
Red is a reign that ended without a fight. Neither of the two shortest reigns in UFC history ended in the cage.
Jon Jones holds the most title defences in UFC history and the second-shortest reign.
Where these numbers come from
All 219 reign and vacancy rows are seeded records with nothing yet locked or human-verified. 31 carry an ambiguity flag with no recorded reason. Six reigns have no linked fighter id because of spelling drift, which is why every leaderboard here groups by name rather than by id. Reign lengths are computed from the start and end dates because the stored length column is empty on 81 rows and disagrees with the dates on 17 more. Nothing on this page has been checked against the official record books, so treat it as a careful read of our database rather than as the record itself.
Computed 4 Oct 2026.
See every reign, division by division