These are FightIQ's data rankings. They are not the UFC's rankings and do not replace them. The UFC's official rankings, now produced with Meta, are on UFC.com. The UFC has not published how its model works. This page sets out exactly how ours does.
Every fighter has a strength we cannot see directly. We estimate it from results. When two fighters meet, the gap between their strengths sets the chance that each one wins: a big gap means a likely win, a small gap means close to a coin toss.
Every UFC result is fitted together into one set of strengths, so an old win is re-valued by what the beaten opponent did afterwards. Beating someone who later became a contender counts for more than it looked on the night.
Each fighter also has a separate adjustment for each division. A fighter moving up or down carries his strength with him, plus extra uncertainty until he proves it in the new weight class.
Every strength comes with an uncertainty. Few fights, old fights or wins over much weaker opponents leave it wide. We rank on the cautious end: strength minus one unit of uncertainty. A fighter with a short, perfect record has to show more before he climbs above an established contender.
An entry is marked provisional for either of two reasons, and the page says which:
Old results count for less. A fight loses half its weight every three years. A fighter who stops competing drifts back towards average, and his uncertainty widens.
The UFC champion is shown at the top of each division as Champion, outside our 1 to 15, as the UFC does. Underneath, one line shows where our data would place him ("Our data: No. 3"). That line is information, not a demotion.
We tested several hundred combinations on UFC fights from 2010 to 2023, kept the one that best predicted results, and froze it.
Before looking at any result, we wrote down a test and fixed the method. The test used every UFC fight from January 2024 to October 2026 in which both fighters were ranked by the UFC. For each fight we took the rankings as they stood beforehand and asked a simple question: did the higher-ranked fighter win?
There were 280 such fights. The higher fighter in our rankings won 61% of them. The higher fighter in the UFC's rankings won 53%. (That test was of the earlier method. On 10 October 2026 we tightened the rules above after spotting a flaw: a fighter could reach a division's top five on wins from another division or from years ago. Run over the same 280 fights, the stricter rules score 58%, still above the UFC's 53%, but this is a look back at fights we had already seen, not a new test.)
That gap is not yet statistically proven. On 280 fights, chance alone could produce a gap that size, so under the rule we set in advance the result reads "no better shown", not "better".
From the next card onwards we are running a new test, written down before any of its fights happen. It covers every UFC fight in which both fighters are ranked by FightIQ, by the UFC's Meta rankings and by UFC.com's standard table, using each list as it stood before the card. The champion counts as the top of every list. We will compare how often each list's higher-ranked fighter wins. We will claim we are better only if the difference clears a statistical bar, and we will not read the result until 100 fights have been scored. The method stays frozen for the whole test. We changed the method twice before the test began, on 10 and 11 October 2026 (the second time to make the head-to-head rule work across the top-five line), before any of its fights had happened, and registered each change. A running tally will be on this page.
The test was written down before any of its fights. It covers every UFC fight in which both fighters are ranked by FightIQ, by Meta and by the UFC's standard table, using each list as it stood before the card. We will not read the result until 100 fights have been scored.
Lists: FightIQ; Meta UFC Rankings, ufc.com; UFC official rankings.
The rankings know only who fought whom, how and when. They cannot see:
A newcomer from another promotion needs three UFC fights before he appears.
The rankings are recomputed every Monday after a UFC card, using only results available at the time. Each week's list is saved and never changed afterwards. Movement arrows compare with the previous saved list.