Most Submissions in UFC History
Fighters with the most submission victories in UFC competition
2026 Stats
🥋 About Most Submissions in UFC History
This leaderboard ranks UFC fighters purely by the number of fights they have finished via submission inside the Octagon. We pull each fighter's career submission total directly from their 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, and the count reflects UFC bouts as they are recorded in our database, so it updates as new finishes are logged.
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.