MMA Calendar 2026: UFC, ONE, PFL — and What Happened to Bellator

Autumn 2026 is one of the busiest stretches the sport has had in years, and the shape of it is different from the usual pay-per-view rhythm. The UFC closes the year with four numbered events, ONE Championship keeps filling Bangkok's Lumpinee Stadium, and Bellator — a promotion that ran for over fifteen years — no longer exists as a separate company. Planning what to watch now takes a little more reading than it used to.

What follows is the working calendar for the rest of 2026, plus the one change in how the UFC reaches viewers that affects every card on the list.

The UFC closes 2026 with four numbered cards

The run starts on 3 October with UFC 332, Silva vs. Wang, at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. From there the calendar jumps to 24 October and UFC 333, Volkanovski vs. Evloev, at the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi — one of the promotion's regular international stops and therefore an early-evening card for European viewers.

The biggest date of the block is 14 November: UFC 334, Gane vs. Hokit, at Madison Square Garden in New York. A heavyweight title fight in that building is the kind of card the sport builds a month around. The year then finishes on 12 December with UFC 335 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

Two recent events set the context. UFC 330 in August headlined Makhachev vs. Machado Garry in Philadelphia in front of 19,236 people, and UFC 331 in September brought Van vs. Pantoja 2 to the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles with 19,357 in the building. Both sold out a major arena, which shows the lighter divisions now carry cards on their own.

What the new broadcast deal changes

From 2026 the UFC streams exclusively on Paramount+ under a seven-year agreement with Paramount Skydance worth 7.7 billion dollars. Some numbered events will also air on CBS, which puts the biggest cards in front of a free-to-air audience in the United States for the first time in years.

The practical effect is that the old pay-per-view model is on the way out. Events stream at no extra cost to subscribers, so watching a numbered card costs a subscription rather than a one-off purchase.

It also changes how promoters build a schedule. When every event sits behind the same subscription, the incentive is to spread headline fights across more dates instead of concentrating them into a few expensive shows, which is why this autumn looks so crowded.

ONE Championship keeps Friday nights busy

ONE Championship runs a different model: a steady stream of events in Bangkok plus a handful of bigger shows elsewhere in Asia. In October the Friday Fights series returns to the Lumpinee Boxing Stadium with cards on 2 and 9 October, mixing Muay Thai, kickboxing and mixed rules bouts.

The bigger ONE Fight Night card lands on 17 October at the Ariake Arena in Japan, followed by further events on 7 November and 12 December. For anyone who follows striking rather than grappling, those Lumpinee cards are the most consistent high-level Muay Thai available on a weekly basis.

The Friday Fights series is also the easiest place to watch elite Muay Thai, since the cards run on a weekly rhythm rather than a pay-per-view build-up.

Bellator is gone, and that still matters

Bellator stopped operating on 14 January 2025. Founded in 2008, it spent its last years owned by the Professional Fighters League, which bought the promotion in 2023 before folding its events into its own calendar and taking on much of its roster.

The four-promotion landscape many fans still describe — UFC, Bellator, ONE, PFL — is really a three-promotion landscape now. Fighters who built their names under the Bellator banner appear on PFL cards, and the PFL has continued with its seasonal format through 2026.

It also explains why fighters who looked like long-term champions of a second promotion now appear inside the UFC. The market for elite talent is narrower than it was five years ago.

How to read a fight card

A numbered UFC event is split into early prelims, prelims and a main card, with the main card carrying the title fights. The order matters: the bout placed just before the main event is usually a title eliminator or a former champion's return.

The table below sets out the key dates and what each card is carrying. Times are local to the venue, so cards outside the United States will land at a different hour on the clock at home.

Early prelims start several hours before the main card, so an Abu Dhabi show lands in the European evening while a Las Vegas show runs past midnight on the east coast.

What to watch in this block

Three things are worth following across the next four months. The first is the heavyweight division, which has been the thinnest weight class at the top for years and now has a champion defending in a building that magnifies every result. The second is featherweight, where a long-reigning champion is being matched against a contender with a wrestling base — always the most interesting stylistic problem in the sport.

The third is the lighter weight classes, which have quietly become the most competitive part of the roster. The flyweight and bantamweight titles have changed hands repeatedly over the last two seasons, and the contenders behind the champions are young enough that another change is a matter of when, not if.

• Add the Abu Dhabi card to the calendar early — it starts at a friendlier hour than the American shows.
• Watch the co-main events, not only the title fights: that is where the next title shot is decided.
• If you follow striking, the Bangkok Friday cards are the most reliable weekly fix.

The rest of 2026 will not be defined by one enormous card the way previous years were. It will be defined by a steady run of well-matched fights spread across three promotions, and by a distribution model that finally made watching the sport cheaper than buying it one event at a time. For a fan who wants to follow the whole calendar rather than one night, this is the best arrangement the sport has had.

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