Most Finishes in UFC History

The career finishers — most knockouts and submissions of all time, UFC bouts only

About Career Finishes

This leaderboard ranks fighters by the total number of fights they've ended inside the distance — every knockout, technical knockout, and submission on their UFC record combined. It's the volume board: the sport's most reliable finishers, the fighters you tune in for because the scorecards rarely get involved. The two chips under each figure split it into knockouts (KO) and submissions (SUB).

Every number here comes from bouts fought in the UFC, so a fighter's regional-circuit finishes do not appear. The division dropdown re-counts the figure from the bouts contested at that weight class rather than filtering by the fighter's current division, so the divisions add up to the career figure exactly.

What a finish count does not capture

A finish is recorded the same way whether it took twelve seconds or fourteen and a half minutes, and whether it came against a champion or a debutant. The total therefore says a great deal about how a fighter wins and very little about who they beat — a long career spent finishing lower-tier opposition can out-count a short one spent stopping contenders. It is also a count of wins only: a fighter who has been stopped as often as they have stopped others sits on this board with no hint of it. Doctor's stoppages are grouped with knockouts because that is how the official record classifies them, which flatters cut stoppages slightly relative to clean knockdowns. And because the figure grows with every bout, an active veteran will climb past a retired one on activity alone.

Volume isn't the same as efficiency. A career finisher with 100 fights will out-count a young phenom who finishes almost everyone, so pair this with our highest finish-rate and KO-rate pages to separate the busy from the lethal. For single-discipline crowns, see most knockouts and most submissions.

For single nights rather than careers, see the UFC events with the most finishes — the cards where the most fights ended inside the distance.

And because a finish over a debutant counts the same as one over a champion, the sharper question is how many a fighter scored with a belt on the line. That has its own leaderboard: most title fight finishes, where Anderson Silva leads on nine. See also most title fight wins.