How long is each round in mixed martial arts?

Like just about all sports, MMA is a timed sport. Divided up between rounds, each round is timed with an intermission in between to allow a break.

In mixed martial arts, time is everything. Fights don’t last forever, no matter how many “fight forever” chants you may have heard from the fans across various combat sports. Fights typically are 15 to 25 minutes long and are divided up between three or five rounds depending on if the fight is for a title. Typically though, despite the number of rounds per fight, the length of the round is typically the same.

Under the Unified Rules of MMA, all rounds in a fight are five minutes long. This is the same for the UFC, Bellator, Rizin, ONE Championship, Invicta FC, and just about all other major promotions. The length of a round does not change typically, no matter how many rounds there are.

This hasn’t always been the case. In the now-defunct Japanese promotion, PRIDE FC, they had their rounds divided up over two or three breaks, with the first round lasting ten minutes, and the second and third only being five minutes long.

The time in a fight is also important if you’re scoring it. Under the Unified Rules, fights that end before the time expires in the final round will be scored with the round the fight stopped in, and how much time had elapsed in that given round. For instance, if the fight in the second round with only a second left on the clock, the score sheet would say something to the effect of round 2, 4:59.

In Rizin, another Japanese promotion, they don’t reset the clock after each round. They measure the time by the whole amount available. So in Rizin, it would say the fight ended in round 2, 9:59.

They measure the length of the fight in its totality, instead of treating each round as a new five minute period.

While watching other promotions like ONE Championship, Bellator, Rizin, or anyone else, it’s important to remember that sometimes they have different sports on their shows as well. Like kickboxing, Mui Thai, and even boxing. Sometimes the length of these rounds will change from promotion to promotion, but if you’re ever watching ONE Championship and all of a sudden there’s a kickboxing bout in the middle of your MMA, more times than not, the rounds will be three minutes long. More like a traditional boxing match.

Hopefully, this helps clears up any confusion new fans might have about the way time is measured in MMA.