UFC Fight Night payouts: how much did Salkilld and Gamrot make?
UFC Fight Night payouts and bonuses: $525,000 paid out, four $100,000 awards and five $25,000 finish incentives. Who earned what, and what the UFC never discloses.
The UFC handed out $525,000 in bonus money at the Meta Apex on Saturday night, and $100,000 of it went to a man who lost his fight.
That is the shape of the promotion's new bonus structure, and Saturday was a clean illustration of it. Four fighters collected the standard award, now $100,000 apiece since the UFC 324 restructure in January doubled it from $50,000. Five more collected the $25,000 finish incentive introduced alongside it, which pays every knockout and submission win on the card except the ones already holding a bigger check.
How much did Quillan Salkilld make?
Quillan Salkilld took Performance of the Night for submitting Mateusz Gamrot at 4:25 of round one, which is worth $100,000 on top of whatever his contract pays. It is his fifth Performance bonus in six UFC fights. He has been paid a post-fight award for every appearance except the one where he went to a decision.
Because the awards do not stack with the finish incentive, the choke did not also earn him the $25,000. The rule is one or the other, and $100,000 is obviously the one you want.
Gamrot, for his part, earned no bonus money. He is the reason people bought the card and he leaves it with his base purse, which the UFC does not disclose.
UFC Fight Night payouts: the full bonus board
| Fighter | Award | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Diego Ferreira | Fight of the Night | $100,000 |
| Billy Quarantillo | Fight of the Night | $100,000 |
| Quillan Salkilld | Performance of the Night | $100,000 |
| Ty Miller | Performance of the Night | $100,000 |
| Yadier del Valle | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Diyar Nurgozhay | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Jose Montanha | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Miles Johns | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Juliana Miller | Finish incentive | $25,000 |
| Total | $525,000 |
Quarantillo is the one worth pausing on. He lost a unanimous decision and still banked $100,000, because Fight of the Night pays both corners and he and Ferreira threw 444 significant strikes at each other across three rounds. Ferreira landed 116 of his 236, Quarantillo 73 of 208. If you want a single argument for why the award exists, it is that the guy who loses the best fight on the card should not go home with less than the guy who wins a dull one.
Ferreira's share is the ninth post-fight bonus of an 18-fight UFC career that started in 2014. He is 41 years old.
Ty Miller has now been paid a Performance bonus in both of his UFC appearances. His debut was at UFC 324, the first card under the new numbers, so he has never fought in the promotion under the old $50,000 rate. Two fights, $200,000 in awards, and he turned 26 in June.
What these numbers do not include
The UFC has not disclosed base purses since Nevada stopped publishing them, so nothing above is a fighter's total earnings for the night. Not counted here: contracted show and win money, the promotional guidelines compliance payments that scale with tenure, locker room bonuses, sponsorship, or any private arrangement. What is counted is the bonus program, because that is the part the promotion announces and the part our data actually records.
Anyone quoting you a full purse figure for this card is estimating. We are not going to.
Who the $25,000 is really aimed at
Five of the nine checks were finish incentives, four of them for stoppages inside the first round, and four of the five went to prelim fighters. Only del Valle collected one on the main card. The $25,000 incentive is a small number next to the $100,000 award, and it is aimed squarely at the prelim fighter deciding whether to hunt the finish in round three of a fight he is already winning.
On Saturday it paid five times. Ask again in a year whether the finish rate moved, because that is the only number that tells you if the incentive is working or if the UFC just found a cheaper way to say thank you.
Full results and the bonus board are on the event page, and every UFC bonus we have on record is at /bonuses.