The new UFC rankings system is coming on Monday, June 22nd 2026, whether the world is ready for them or not.
That’s the word from UFC CEO Dana White, who shared a bit of information about the incoming system designed to fix the shortcomings of the current ranking system, which has been lacking for years now.
What do we know so far? The new system will be “an objective, data-driven approach, rather than based on opinion or popularity” that is “designed to reward performance.” During Saturday’s UFC Fight Night: Kape vs. Horiguchi event, the schedule for these rankings was upgraded from ‘Coming soon’ to debuting on Monday.
“Hopefully, they work,” he said with a laugh. “But, yeah, they come out Monday. We’ll have all the details and everything you need to know about them will hit on Monday.”
White had previously hyped up the new ranking system by saying “A.I. is coming!“ Considering A.I. still has some issues counting how many R’s are in ‘strawberry,’ that had some worried. Fortunately, White isn’t going the fully autonomous route and still plans on having some humans in the loop.
“I’m gonna have both, I’m still gonna do human, nonhuman, however you wanna look at it, rankings,” he said. “And I think that neither will be perfect, but it’ll get us closer. And the rankings that are gonna come out on Monday, I think, make a lot more sense. You know, I think you’re gonna have a lot of people who are gonna complain and argue and go, ‘Oh, this isn’t fair. That’s not right.’”
That makes it sound like we could see a big overhaul of the entire ranking system, one that doesn’t just move around the fighters from Saturday’s fights but completely resets the board based on the new system. Inactive fighters could be bounced way down or out of the rankings. Unranked athletes smashing heads on the prelim could become top 15 ranked overnight.
A big shakeup like this will surely bring controversy, but White asked for the same patience with the new system as he’s asking with his Zuffa Boxing project.
“We’ll see how it plays out over the first year,” he said.
