How many rounds are MMA fights?

Just about all sports have ways to split up the action, be it innings, quarters, halves or periods. That’s no different for MMA, which is split up in rounds.

In just about all sports, the event is dolled out in increments. In college basketball, the teams play two distinct halves.  In hockey, the game is divided up across three separate periods. Football has quarters, golf has different holes and even bowling is separated by frames. In most forms of professional combat sports, the same is true. Yet, in MMA, it’s divided up into rounds.

Now for older boxing fans getting into MMA, the idea is similar but different. In boxing, you have 12, three-minute rounds usually. In MMA, a standard bout is three, five-minute rounds. This is the typical way rounds are timed in MMA across the world for the most part. There are a few exceptions.

For instance, in championship fights there are two more rounds, making it a five-round fight, at five minutes apiece. These are often called championship rounds. This is the common time and length for just about all promotions in the world, save for a few, when it comes to championship fights. The one big obvious exception is the UFC, who will use the championship rounds for all main events. So if it’s a regular fight or a championship fight, as long as it’s the main event the fight will be five rounds.

The rounds structure is part of the MMA Unified Rules, which is the benchmark for MMA as a whole and has been widely adopted by most governing bodies and promotions.

Not every company has or does follow this set of rules. In the now-defunct Pride FC, the round system was different, featuring three rounds, but the first round was 10 minutes long, while the second and third rounds were five minutes apiece. For Grand Prix’s, which Pride often used as single night tournaments, the fights would be a two-round system, with 10 minutes in the first, and five minutes in the second.

There are also exceptions for tournament-style rounds (when the fighter is expected to fight more than once in a night) or for amateur fighters.

Not every promotion does things the same way, so it’s always good to look up the company you’re watching and see if they follow the Unified Rules of MMA, or not. If not, sometimes, they list the rules they follow and what rule book they use.