The Growth of MMA Handle in 2024-2025: A $10.3B Year and What Comes Next

The chart that surprised me when I first plotted it

I pulled the year-over-year MMA handle series into a spreadsheet last December and was expecting a familiar shape — flat through the pandemic years, a step up in 2022 as more states went live, then a gradual plateau. What I actually got was a curve that bent the wrong way in the back half. Handle didn’t just grow in 2024; it accelerated. And when I cross-checked the per-state contributions, the acceleration wasn’t coming from new state activations. It was coming from existing regulated markets deepening their per-card volume on method-of-victory and live segments that didn’t really exist as meaningful product categories four years ago.

So that’s the lens for this piece. The $10.3 billion 2024 number is not a story about more people discovering MMA betting. It’s a story about a maturing product mix in a stable set of states, with the long-tail global market still well behind US activity but catching up faster than the US base is growing. I’m going to walk through the four data points that matter — the 2024 US handle, the global segment size, UFC’s share of that segment, and the 2025 trajectory — and then say what I’d watch for in 2026 as a bettor sitting outside the regulated market.

See also: UFC PPV cycle and betting volume patterns.

The 2024 numbers and what they actually measure

MMA handle in the US reached $10.3 billion in 2024, growing seventeen percent year on year. That’s the headline. Before I read anything into it, I want to be clear about what the number does and doesn’t include. Handle is gross wagered amount on regulated platforms — the total dollar volume that passes through state-licensed sportsbooks on MMA markets, not the net revenue retained by the operators after payouts. A $1,000 bet on a methods-of-victory market counts as $1,000 of handle regardless of whether it wins or loses. The seventeen-percent growth rate is therefore a volume measure, not a profitability measure for the books.

The other thing the number excludes is offshore activity. Any wagers placed by US residents through unlicensed offshore sportsbooks, peer-to-peer Discord books, or crypto sports betting platforms sit entirely outside this measurement. The state-level data feeds that aggregate up to the $10.3 billion figure only see what passes through licensed operators. For UFC specifically, the offshore share of total US-resident handle is structurally meaningful — partly because UFC overindexes among bettors in non-regulated states like California, and partly because some live-betting product depth is still better on offshore platforms than on regulated ones for technical reasons.

So when I see seventeen percent growth in a year when the underlying regulated-state footprint barely expanded, my read is that the per-bettor volume in existing regulated states grew, and that growth was concentrated in product categories that didn’t have meaningful penetration two years earlier. Method of victory, total rounds, in-fight live markets, and same-game-style fight parlays. The product matured; the population didn’t expand much.

Global market context — the slower curve

Step back to the global picture and the numbers look different. The global combat-sports betting market — MMA plus boxing combined — was valued at $3.2 billion in 2024 with a projection to over $6 billion by 2033. That sounds like a healthy growth trajectory until you compare it to the US-only number. The US regulated-state handle of $10.3 billion is more than triple the global segment estimate, which initially looks like a definitional contradiction.

It’s not a contradiction; it’s a methodology gap. The $3.2 billion global figure is a revenue estimate — gross gaming revenue retained by operators after payouts — not a handle figure. The $10.3 billion is handle. At typical MMA hold rates of seven to nine percent, the implied US-only operator revenue on $10.3 billion of handle is roughly $700 million to $900 million annually. Plug that into the global $3.2 billion frame and the US share lands around a quarter to a third of global combat-sports operator revenue, which is consistent with what I’d expect given the US’s structural overweight in MMA-specific betting versus boxing.

The interesting forward number is the projection to over $6 billion globally by 2033. That implies roughly an eight-to-nine percent compound annual growth rate from current global revenue, materially slower than the seventeen-percent year-over-year handle growth the US delivered in 2024. The two rates aren’t directly comparable, but the divergence suggests that analysts forecasting the global segment expect the US sub-segment to slow as the regulated-state footprint reaches saturation. Whether that’s right depends largely on California — without it, the US footprint stops expanding meaningfully, and the growth has to come from product depth in already-live states.

UFC’s share of the segment and why it grows faster

UFC GGR has compounded at over eighteen percent annually for the past five years — higher than most major US sports. That single line tells you most of what you need to know about why UFC dominates the MMA-betting conversation in regulated states. The promotion’s underlying revenue is growing faster than the broader combat-sports segment, faster than NFL, faster than NBA. When the underlying property grows that fast, the betting handle attached to it grows with it.

The reasons UFC’s GGR outpaces the broader segment are structural. UFC controls roughly seventy percent of global MMA media value and a similar share of regulated-state betting handle within MMA, so when the segment expands, UFC captures a disproportionate part of it. The PPV cycle creates concentrated betting events that pull in casual and recreational money beyond the regular Saturday Fight Night base, and the international card cycle extends the calendar so there are fewer dark Saturdays. Add in the methods-of-victory market depth, which UFC’s stats infrastructure supports better than smaller promotions’ data feeds allow, and you get a property that converts higher per-impression than competing combat-sports inventory.

The eighteen-percent CAGR also has compounding implications. If that rate holds through 2026 and 2027, UFC’s GGR doubles every four years. The sponsorship revenue line, the broadcast rights line, and the betting partner deal values all scale with that growth — which is why the sportsbook category has been willing to escalate official partner deal values in successive negotiation cycles, even as the overall sportsbook category has tightened its own margins.

What I would not extrapolate from that figure is per-bettor profitability. A growing GGR base with growing operator competition doesn’t automatically mean better lines for bettors; it often means more aggressive promotional spend and slightly tighter operational pricing as books fight for share of a profitable pool.

See also: how to bet on ufc in california — handle growth.

The 2025 trajectory in the data so far

The 2025 numbers aren’t fully audited yet at the point I’m writing this, but the quarterly state-level revenue reports I’ve been tracking through the year tell a directionally consistent story. Q1 2025 was running ahead of Q1 2024 on MMA-specific handle in the states that report sport-level breakdowns, with some states showing twelve-to-fifteen-percent year-over-year growth on regular Fight Night cards and significantly higher spikes on the four numbered PPV cards in the quarter.

The pattern that’s clearest from the quarterly reports is the concentration of handle on numbered cards. UFC 300, UFC 314, the international fly-aways with championship main events — these pull two to four times the handle of a routine Fight Night card. That concentration was already true in 2023; it became more pronounced in 2024 and 2025 as the operators got better at running promotional pushes around the marquee cards, and as the broadcast integration got tighter.

What I haven’t seen in the 2025 data so far is the broad-based per-state growth that would suggest new bettors are entering the market in significant numbers. The growth pattern looks like deepening per-bettor volume in the existing regulated states, with the per-card concentration intensifying around the four-to-six biggest cards of the year. That’s a useful insight for anyone trying to size their own bankroll relative to the market — the depth on a UFC 300-scale card is materially deeper than on a typical Saturday, and lines move differently as a result.

What I’d watch in 2026

Three signals matter for 2026, and they’re the ones I’d track if you’re trying to anticipate where the segment goes from here. First, whether any of California’s repeated legislative attempts to legalise sports betting produce a workable framework — I’ve covered the structural reasons that’s been slow to happen in the work on PPV cycles and betting volume, but the short version is that without California the US regulated handle base loses its biggest potential expansion. Second, whether prediction-market platforms continue to capture event-contract volume on UFC fights at the rate they did in 2025; that flow is partially substituting for traditional sportsbook handle in non-regulated states and may distort the year-over-year growth rates in either direction depending on how the AGA and state regulators classify it.

Third, the per-card handle concentration. If the marquee-card share of annual handle continues to grow, operators will price the regular Fight Night markets less aggressively because the volume just isn’t there to justify the operational cost — which would create asymmetric value opportunities for the bettors who treat Fight Night cards as their primary playing field. That’s a structural read, not a tactical one, but it’s the kind of structural shift that ends up dictating where the sharp money actually finds value.