UFC 331 payouts: what Joshua Van, Alexandre Pantoja and every fighter made
Full disclosed UFC 331 salaries from the California State Athletic Commission: every purse, win bonus, award and total, plus how our estimates held up.
The California State Athletic Commission released the UFC 331 purse list, which makes this one of the handful of 2026 cards where nobody has to guess. Twenty-four fighters, $4,619,000 in disclosed purses, $525,000 in post-fight awards, and a recorded payroll of $5,144,000 on our payout table.
The biggest number on the card belongs to the man who lost the main event. Alexandre Pantoja was paid a flat $650,000 to challenge for the flyweight title, took a $100,000 Fight of the Night award for the 25 minutes he spent trying to take it back, and finished the night on $750,000 in purse and bonus, the biggest recorded payday on the card. Joshua Van kept the belt and made $600,000.
That is not an anomaly on this card. It is the shape of it.
UFC 331 payouts: what every fighter made
Three numbers stack into each total. The disclosed purse is what CSAC published: show money, plus an equal win bonus where the contract carried one and the fighter won. The post-fight bonus is the $100,000 award or the $25,000 finish incentive, which have not stacked since UFC 324. Compliance pay is the promotional-guidelines money paid by tenure, which sits outside the commission filing entirely; those figures are our own tier assignment, not the commission's.
Main card
| Fighter | Result | Show | Win bonus | Post-fight bonus | Compliance (est.) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joshua Van | W, UD | $500,000 | flat deal | $100,000 | $42,000 | $642,000 |
| Alexandre Pantoja | L, UD | $650,000 | flat deal | $100,000 | $32,000 | $782,000 |
| Arman Tsarukyan | W, KO/TKO R1 | $350,000 | flat deal | $100,000 | $11,000 | $461,000 |
| Maurício Ruffy | L, KO/TKO R1 | $110,000 | $0 | $0 | $6,000 | $116,000 |
| Patricio Pitbull | W, KO/TKO R1 | $200,000 | $200,000 | $25,000 | $4,500 | $429,500 |
| Dooho Choi | L, KO/TKO R1 | $85,000 | $0 | $0 | $11,000 | $96,000 |
| Gable Steveson | L, KO/TKO R1 | $160,000 | $0 | $0 | $4,000 | $164,000 |
| Sean Sharaf | W, KO/TKO R1 | $30,000 | $30,000 | $25,000 | $4,000 | $89,000 |
| Alonzo Menifield | W, SD | $155,000 | $155,000 | $0 | $16,000 | $326,000 |
| Iwo Baraniewski | L, SD | $50,000 | $0 | $0 | $4,500 | $54,500 |
Prelims
| Fighter | Result | Show | Win bonus | Post-fight bonus | Compliance (est.) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marlon Vera | W, KO/TKO R3 | $200,000 | $200,000 | $25,000 | $21,000 | $446,000 |
| Charles Jourdain | L, KO/TKO R3 | $108,000 | $0 | $0 | $16,000 | $124,000 |
| Tai Tuivasa | L, SD | $350,000 | $0 | $0 | $16,000 | $366,000 |
| Robelis Despaigne | W, SD | $100,000 | $100,000 | $0 | $4,500 | $204,500 |
| Michael Aswell Jr. | W, SD | $30,000 | $30,000 | $0 | $4,500 | $64,500 |
| JooSang Yoo | L, SD | $12,000 | $0 | $0 | $4,000 | $16,000 |
| Ryan Gandra | W, KO/TKO R1 | $14,000 | $14,000 | $25,000 | $4,000 | $57,000 |
| Ozzy Diaz | L, KO/TKO R1 | $25,000 | $0 | $0 | $4,500 | $29,500 |
Early prelims
| Fighter | Result | Show | Win bonus | Post-fight bonus | Compliance (est.) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edmen Shahbazyan | W, UD | $125,000 | $125,000 | $0 | $16,000 | $266,000 |
| Brunno Ferreira | L, UD | $95,000 | $0 | $0 | $11,000 | $106,000 |
| Casey O'Neill | W, SUB R1 | $66,000 | $66,000 | $100,000 | $6,000 | $238,000 |
| Eduarda Moura | L, SUB R1 | $33,000 | $0 | $0 | $6,000 | $39,000 |
| Giga Chikadze | L, KO/TKO R1 | $93,000 | $0 | $0 | $11,000 | $104,000 |
| Joanderson Brito | W, KO/TKO R1 | $79,000 | $79,000 | $25,000 | $11,000 | $194,000 |
Our on-site payout table counts purse plus award and stops there, so its totals run below the ones here by each fighter's compliance tier. Purses and awards together come to $5,144,000; add the compliance tiers and the card cost about $5,414,500 in money anyone can count.
One line before you read any of it as the whole truth. CSAC filings exclude performance and discretionary bonuses, and they exclude letters of agreement, the side deals used with bigger names. The two biggest purses on the card, and the co-main event winner's, were flat contracts with no win bonus at all, which is what a negotiated deal looks like on a commission form. For the men on $12,000 the disclosed figure is the entire story. For the ones on $650,000 it is a floor.
How much did Alexandre Pantoja make at UFC 331?
$782,000 all in: a flat $650,000 purse, a $100,000 Fight of the Night award, and $32,000 at the title-challenger compliance tier. He lost.
The flat deal is the point. Pantoja does not carry a show-and-win contract any more, so the belt changing hands did not change his check by a dollar. He was paid the same for losing a five-round decision as he would have been for winning one, which is the arrangement a fighter with four title defenses behind him gets to negotiate, and the reason a 14-5 record in the UFC has been worth more to him than any single night.
Van, the champion who beat him, was paid $500,000 flat and made $642,000 with his own Fight of the Night share and the $42,000 champion compliance tier. The champion made $140,000 less than the challenger. Nothing about that is irregular: purses are negotiated at signing, Pantoja arrived as a former champion with a long title run, and Van arrived nine months into his first reign on a contract signed when he was a prospect.
How much did Joshua Van make at UFC 331?
$642,000, and it is his fourth post-fight check in twelve UFC fights. Three of those are Fight of the Night: UFC 317 in June 2025, UFC 328 in May, and this one. The fourth came in July 2024, when he lost to Charles Johnson and was handed a Performance award anyway.
He has won eight in a row since, and is 11-1 in the UFC. At each night's rate those four awards are worth $300,000, which against a $500,000 purse is no longer a rounding error on his income. It is a second contract.
Photo: Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador / CC BY-SA 2.0
Who won the UFC 331 bonuses?
| Fighter | Award | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Joshua Van | Fight of the Night | $100,000 |
| Alexandre Pantoja | Fight of the Night | $100,000 |
| Arman Tsarukyan | Performance of the Night | $100,000 |
| Casey O'Neill | Performance of the Night | $100,000 |
| Patricio Pitbull | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Sean Sharaf | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Marlon Vera | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Ryan Gandra | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Joanderson Brito | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
Tsarukyan's award is his fifth Performance of the Night in eleven UFC wins, and he has now taken a post-fight check in six of his thirteen appearances. O'Neill's is her third, and one of the three came in a fight she lost: the UFC paid her a Performance award for a submission defeat at UFC 296 in December 2023. At each night's rate her three awards are worth $200,000 against a show purse of $66,000.
For Ryan Gandra the arithmetic is starker. He showed for $14,000, the smallest purse of any winner on the card, doubled it with the win, and the $25,000 incentive for stopping Ozzy Diaz in the first round paid him almost twice what his contract did. He is 4-0 in the UFC, and on this card the promotion paid him more for the manner of the win than for the win itself.
The $350,000 that came with an eighth straight loss
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Tai Tuivasa was paid $350,000 to show against Robelis Despaigne and lost a split decision, his eighth defeat in a row going back to September 2022. It was the third-largest purse on the card, ahead of every winner except Pantoja and Van, and $150,000 more than Marlon Vera was paid to show one fight later on the same prelim card.
Despaigne beat him and made $200,000, his first win since March 2024. The man on the eight-fight skid out-earned the man who ended it by $150,000, and neither figure is a scandal. They are two contracts signed at two different moments: Tuivasa's when he was 8-1 in the UFC with five straight knockouts and a main event in Paris, Despaigne's when he was an unproven heavyweight with four professional fights.
That is the honest version of the pay complaint people usually make badly. The UFC is not paying Tuivasa for last night. It is paying him what it agreed to pay him in 2022, and a contract is a lagging indicator in both directions: it pays a fading star long after the run, and it pays a live one a prospect's rate long before the promotion admits what it has.
How close were our estimates?
We publish estimated purses because most cards never disclose anything. This one did, so here is our homework marked in public.
Across all 24 fighters the median estimate came in at 0.89 times the real show money, 13 of 24 landed within 30 percent, and 18 of 24 within a factor of two. We had Giga Chikadze at exactly $93,000 and Ozzy Diaz at exactly $25,000. We had Dooho Choi at $81,000 against a real $85,000.
The misses are the interesting part and they run one way. We were far too low on the negotiated top end: Pantoja at an estimated $302,000 against $650,000, Tuivasa at $104,000 against $350,000, Patricio Pitbull at $71,000 against $200,000, Despaigne at $31,000 against $100,000. Every one of those is a fighter who arrived with leverage from somewhere else, a title run, a Bellator championship, a marketable name, and leverage is the thing eighteen years of commission filings cannot see.
The worst single miss is the clearest example. We had Gable Steveson at $17,000 to show on the evidence of two UFC fights. He was paid $160,000, because he is an Olympic gold medalist and the promotion signed him as one. The correction applies everywhere we cannot verify: when a fighter's fame arrived before their UFC record did, assume the real purse is higher than any tenure-based estimate.
Why does California publish UFC salaries when Nevada does not?
Because disclosure is a state rule, not a promotional one. Nevada went confidential in 2020 and most of the calendar followed. California still releases the figures on request, which is why a Los Angeles card produces a full list of names and dollars within a day while a Las Vegas card of identical size produces a podium announcement and nothing else.
There is no published league minimum, no collective agreement, no annual report. There are commission filings in a few states, a compliance tier table and bonuses read out at a press conference. Everything else in this article that is not marked disclosed is our estimate, and every fighter's full pay history lives at /salaries.
One last receipt, at the other end of the card from Pantoja's $750,000. JooSang Yoo lost a split decision to Michael Aswell Jr. on $12,000, and with his compliance tier took home $16,000 for three rounds that one of the three judges scored in his favor. The top purse on the card was 54 times his show money. Aswell won the same fight and was paid $64,500. They fought on the same night, in the same building, for three rounds that the judges separated by a single card.