UFC Paris payouts: how much did Parnasse, Hooker and every fighter make?

Dan Hooker walked to the Accor Arena as the number 12 lightweight in the world and left it having been knocked out in two minutes and 35 seconds by a man making his UFC debut. Salahdine Parnasse dropped him, followed him down, and finished it, and the promotion handed him one of four $100,000 Performance of the Night awards on the night. Add the promotional compliance pay every fighter on the card collects and the 14 bouts in Paris are worth at least $685,500 in money we can actually count. The live table for the card sits at /events/ufc-fight-night-2026-09-05/payouts.

The UFC does not disclose purses in France. What follows is the part of the pay that is verifiable, then, separately and clearly marked, what we estimate the base purses look like.

Photo: Atch Academy / CC BY 3.0

Who won the UFC Paris bonuses?

Four Performance of the Night awards, no Fight of the Night. That is unusual and it is also an accurate description of the evening: nothing on this card went the distance in a way that demanded a second look, but four men ended their fights early enough to be paid for it.

• Salahdine Parnasse, $100,000. First-round knockout of Dan Hooker at 2:35, in his first UFC bout, against a ranked lightweight with 25 fights in the promotion.
• Axel Sola, $100,000. The fastest finish of the night, a first-round knockout of Farès Ziam at 1:40, and the biggest domestic upset on the card.
• Losene Keita, $100,000. Two knockdowns and a stoppage of Muhammad Naimov at 2:54 of the first, in his third UFC appearance.
• Mario Pinto, $100,000. Fifty-five seconds into the second round, he took out Ryan Spann, a 19-fight UFC veteran, on the prelims.

Since UFC 324 in January, a post-fight award is worth $100,000, and every KO/TKO or submission win that does not collect an award carries a separate $25,000 finish incentive. The two do not stack. Four fighters in Paris collected the incentive rather than an award: Kurtis Campbell, Modestas Bukauskas, Matthieu Duclos and Delphine Benouaich.

UFC Paris payouts: what every fighter made

The third column is the promotional guidelines compliance payment, the tenure-based figure reported per event by MMA Junkie. It is not a purse. Everything in this table is money we can verify; nothing in it is an estimate.

Main card

Prelims

Card total: $185,500 in compliance pay, $400,000 in awards, $100,000 in finish incentives. $685,500 verified.

How much did Salahdine Parnasse make in total?

$104,000 that we can count, on a debut, which is a strange sentence to write. The compliance program pays him $4,000 because he has one UFC fight, and the award pays him $100,000 because of what he did with it. His base purse is not public and we have no estimate on file for him yet, because he has no UFC pay history to estimate from: before Saturday he was a KSW fighter, and had been since 2019.

That is the real number to sit with. Parnasse arrived in the UFC at 23-2 with a two-division title run in Poland behind him, beat a top-15 lightweight in his first outing, and the only figure attached to his night that anyone outside the promotion can verify is a bonus check. Everything else is a private document.

What were the purses? (our estimate)

The following are estimates, not disclosed figures. We build them from 18 years of commission-disclosed purses, they typically land within about 30 percent, and each name links to its own page where the method is written out.

If those estimates are close, Hooker leaves Paris as the best-paid man on the card despite losing in the first round, and Sola, who produced the fastest finish of the night, made roughly a fifth of what the fighter he replaced in the headlines conversation made. That is not a scandal. It is simply how a promotion pays for tenure rather than for performance, with the bonus program bolted on top to correct for it four times a night.

Why don't we know the exact purses?

Because nobody makes the UFC publish them here. Nevada stopped releasing purse figures around 2018, California still publishes, and events outside the United States sit outside the disclosure system entirely, which is where Paris falls. What the compliance program pays is public because it is a fixed tenure table. What a fighter's contract pays is not.

So the honest split is this: the $685,500 above is money we can stand behind, the estimate table is our best read of the missing part, and neither number includes locker-room bonuses, sponsorship outside the outfitting deal, or anything a manager negotiated on the side. We wrote up what a decade of disclosed pay actually showed in this piece, and every fighter's history lives on /salaries.

The other side of the ledger

Hooker's $21,000 is the top compliance figure on the card, and it is the clearest measure of what he has given the promotion: 25 fights, five post-fight bonuses, three Performance awards and two Fight of the Night checks stretching from 2015 to a split decision over Mateusz Gamrot at UFC 305 in 2024. At the old $50,000 rate those five awards were worth $250,000 in bonus money across a decade, less than the four men in Paris collected in a single night at the new rate.

He is also 36 years old and has now lost three in a row, all by stoppage, to Arman Tsarukyan, Benoit Saint Denis and Parnasse. The tenure table pays him more than anyone else on this card precisely because of how much of that decade he spent absorbing this kind of night, and the tenure table is the only part of his pay any of us are allowed to see.

Parnasse has one UFC fight and one $100,000 check. Hooker has 25 and a $21,000 line item. Both of those things are true and only one of them will still be true in a year.