Most Submissions in UFC History

About Most Submissions in UFC History

Fighters with the most submission victories, counted from UFC bouts only

This leaderboard ranks UFC fighters purely by the number of fights they have finished via submission inside the Octagon. We count every submission win out of a fighter's UFC record, then sort from highest to lowest, using overall wins as a tiebreaker so that the more accomplished grapplers rise to the top of any cluster. Only fighters with at least one submission win appear.

UFC bouts only, and division means the bout's division

Every number here is counted from bouts fought in the UFC, so a submission scored on the regional circuit before a fighter signed does not appear, and a bout that has been announced but not yet contested has no result to count. The division dropdown re-counts the figure from the bouts contested in that weight class instead of filtering by the fighter's current division and printing a career total beside it. That distinction matters for grapplers more than most, because a submission specialist who moves up or down a weight class used to carry every tap with them into the new division's heading. Now the figure is what a fighter actually did in that division, and because the divisions add up to the career figure exactly the number cannot change simply because you touched the filter.

What a high submission count tells you

Submissions are the clearest fingerprint of a true grappler. Unlike a knockout, which can happen in a flash from a single punch, a submission is usually the end of a deliberate sequence: a takedown, positional advancement to the back or to mount, and then the finish. Fighters near the top of this list tend to share a background in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, wrestling, sambo, or judo, and they win by dragging opponents into the deep water of the ground game rather than trading on the feet. A fat submission column also hints at longevity and durability, because choking out elite competition across dozens of fights is something only the most technical and patient grapplers manage to sustain.

Context matters when you read these numbers. A fighter with 10 submissions across 25 fights is a different animal than one with 10 across 12, and the eras matter too, since the early days of the sport rewarded grappling specialists who faced opponents with little ground defense. To weigh submission prowess against the full picture of a fighter's resume, it helps to cross-reference this list with our ELO rankings and dig into individual fighter profiles for the breakdown of how and when those finishes came.

For fans, this stat is one of the most satisfying ways to appreciate the chess match beneath the violence. Submission artists reward viewers who understand grip fighting, hip movement, and the race to a dominant position, and the names atop this board are the ones who turned that craft into a career. Browse it alongside our other UFC stat leaderboards to see how the best grapplers stack up against the knockout merchants and volume strikers.