Longest UFC title reigns

What counts. A reign runs from the night an undisputed UFC title was won to the day it was lost, given up or — for a champion who still holds it — today. The number is calendar days between those two dates, and a defence is a title fight inside the reign that the champion won. The rankings have their own version of this record: how many consecutive weekly tables carried a fighter on the champion line since February 2013. That one counts published tables in the rankings era; this one counts days over the whole history of the belts. A title fight is identified by the exact weight-class string the official record uses for the undisputed belt — “UFC Middleweight Title Bout” and its eleven siblings. The same column carries ninety-odd Ultimate Fighter and Road to UFC tournament finals with “Title Bout” in the name, and none of them is a world title, so they are matched exactly rather than searched for. Interim titles are not reigns here. An interim belt is not the undisputed title, so a fighter who held one starts that reign at the fight that unified it — the row says where that happened. The record contains no vacating, no stripping and no retirement — those are announcements, not fights. A reign that did not end in a defeat is closed at the first weekly ranking table that no longer carried the champion where the tables can see it; before February 2013 they cannot, and 17 reigns are closed instead at the NEXT title fight in that division the champion was not in. That is a proxy and it runs the reign on past the day the belt actually changed hands, by however long the UFC took to book the vacancy; every row it applies to is marked. 1 ranked name is left out entirely — Bruno Silva is shared by two different fighters our source roster cannot tell apart, so any career total under it would be two people's added together. That page is withheld for the same reason. Ties. 2 of the rows below share the same 896 days. Where two reigns run the same number of days the older one is listed first — the first champion to reach a mark is the one that reached it. Where it comes from. Every reign on this page is cut out of the UFC’s own statistical record of the title fights themselves, 1997 to today — not from the weekly ranking tables, which only begin in February 2013. A reign starts on the night the belt was won, and both dates on every row are fights you can open and check. A title fight is identified by the exact weight-class string the official record uses for the undisputed belt — “UFC Middleweight Title Bout” and its eleven siblings. The same column carries ninety-odd Ultimate Fighter and Road to UFC tournament finals with “Title Bout” in the name, and none of them is a world title, so they are matched exactly rather than searched for. Each name links that fighter’s own page, where every title fight this row is built from has its own row and its own bout page. Who holds every belt right now is on the champions page.