UFC Shanghai payouts: Song Yadong, Umar Nurmagomedov, every fighter

Song Yadong walked into the Oriental Sports Center as the sixth-ranked bantamweight in the UFC and walked out with a $100,000 Performance of the Night check, having knocked out the third-ranked man in the division at 1:48 of round two. Add the $16,000 he is owed under the promotional guidelines compliance program at 18 UFC appearances and his verified minimum for the night is $116,000. Across all 26 fighters on the card, the money we can actually verify totals $741,000. The live table for every name is on the UFC Shanghai payouts page.

That is not what the card paid. It is what the card paid that anyone outside the UFC can count. China does not publish purses, no athletic commission released a disclosed sheet for this event, and the promotion has not volunteered one since Nevada stopped requiring them. So the honest version of this article is a floor, not a total.

Who won the UFC Shanghai bonuses?

Four checks, $100,000 each, under the structure the UFC introduced at UFC 324 in January 2026.

Rodrigues is the name worth pausing on. He was not on this card three weeks ago. Junior Tafa fell out, Rodrigues took the light heavyweight spot on short notice, got knocked out in the first round, and collected the same $100,000 as the man who knocked him out. Fight of the Night pays both corners, and short-notice replacements are the only fighters on a UFC card who can turn a loss into a six-figure night.

The other seven finishers on the card did not get an award, which means they got the $25,000 finish incentive instead: Julia Polastri, Hector Santiago, Francesco Nuzzi, Rei Tsuruya, André Lima, Kai Asakura and Denise Gomes. The incentive does not stack: a fighter who takes a $100,000 award does not also take the $25,000, which is why Song, Hasan and Ce Liu appear once in the math and not twice.

UFC Shanghai payouts: what every fighter made

Compliance pay is the tiered sponsorship money the UFC pays per appearance based on how many UFC bouts a fighter has, as reported per event by MMA Junkie. Everything in these tables is a floor: compliance plus bonus or incentive, with no base purse, no win bonus, no sponsorship and no locker-room money included, because none of those are public.

Main card

Prelims

Compliance pay across the card comes to $166,000. The four awards add $400,000 and the seven finish incentives add $175,000. Total verified: $741,000.

The $110,000 gap between the man who won and the man who lost

Photo: Новости ННТ / CC BY 3.0

Umar Nurmagomedov arrived in Shanghai ranked third at bantamweight, a betting favorite at roughly -621 across the books we track, and one fight removed from a decision win over Deiveson Figueiredo. He left having been stopped for the first time in his career. His two career losses now read Merab Dvalishvili by decision and Song Yadong by knockout, and only one of those is the kind a division forgets quickly.

On the verified ledger he made $6,000. That is the compliance tier for a fighter with ten UFC appearances, and it is the entire publicly countable figure attached to a man who was three fights from a title shot on Friday morning. He obviously has a base purse, and it is obviously not $6,000. But the UFC does not disclose it and China does not require it to, so the only number anyone can point at is a sponsorship tier that pays him less than the finish incentive paid to a debutant on the prelims.

That is the structure working exactly as designed. The $110,000 that separates Song's verified night from Umar's is not a reflection of what the two men were actually paid. It is a reflection of which one the promotion chose to hand a discretionary bonus to, and discretionary bonuses are the only part of UFC fighter pay that is reliably public.

What were the purses? (our estimate)

The UFC does not publish base purses for this card, so beyond the verified floor above, the rest is our estimate. We build these from eighteen years of disclosed commission figures; they land within about thirty percent of the real number most of the time, and they miss side letters, pay-per-view points and anything negotiated outside the base contract entirely. Every fighter's page carries the full methodology.

Every figure in that table is an estimate and none of it should be read next to the verified table as though the two carry the same weight. What it does tell you is the shape of the card: a main event between two men we estimate are in roughly the same pay bracket, and a Fight of the Night bonus that was worth more than five times what we estimate the man who lost it earns to show up.

How much did Song Yadong make in total?

Verified, on the night: $116,000. Across his UFC career, the bonus column alone reads eight checks in nine years, which is the part of his earnings nobody has to estimate.

Song has now won Performance of the Night seven times and Fight of the Night once, going back to a first-round submission on the Bisping vs Gastelum card in November 2017. Six of those came at the old $50,000 rate. The last two, the second-round submission of Deiveson Figueiredo in May and this knockout of Umar, came after the January 2026 change to $100,000. That is $500,000 in career bonus money, and it does not include a single dollar of base purse.

He is also, at 28, in the strange position of being the most decorated bonus earner in a division whose top three he has now beaten one of. He lost to Petr Yan in 2024 and to Sean O'Malley in January. He has since submitted Figueiredo and knocked out Umar Nurmagomedov. The bantamweight queue is not short, but it is no longer obvious who is ahead of him in it.

Why don't we know the exact purses?

Because almost nobody is required to tell us any more. Nevada stopped publishing disclosed purses around 2018, California still releases them for cards it sanctions, and everywhere else, including China, the numbers are whatever the promotion chooses to say. What survives is the bonus structure, which the UFC announces at the post-fight press conference, and the compliance tiers, which are reported per event.

We wrote up what a decade of disclosed pay actually showed in this piece, and the full estimate dataset lives at /salaries.

Here is the number that stuck with me. Ce Liu made his UFC debut on Friday against a man who took the fight on short notice, knocked him out in four and a half minutes, and collected $104,000 that we can verify. Umar Nurmagomedov, ranked third in the world, has ten UFC fights, and lost, can be verified for $6,000. Both figures are correct. Only one of them is close to true.