Boxing and MMA share a lot on paper: two fighters, a referee, three judges and a ten-point scoring system. Watch one after the other, though, and the differences show up within a minute. A boxer who goes down gets a count and a chance to recover. An MMA fighter who goes down is often hit again straight away, and that is legal.
In the US, both sports are regulated by state and tribal athletic commissions, and those commissions work together through the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports (ABC). The ABC publishes a set of unified rules for each sport, and the comparisons below are taken from those documents. Individual commissions can adopt their own versions, so a detail can vary from one state to another.
Rounds and fight length
Under the ABC's boxing guidelines, a men's professional round lasts three minutes with a one-minute rest, and no fight can be scheduled for more than 12 rounds. That makes 36 minutes of fighting the most a boxing match can last. The same guidelines set women's bouts at a maximum of ten rounds of two minutes.
MMA rounds are longer and there are fewer of them. The unified MMA rules set a professional round at five minutes, again with a minute of rest, and no contest can go beyond five rounds or 25 minutes. A fighter also cannot compete for more than 25 minutes in any 24-hour period. In practice most MMA fights are three rounds and title fights are five. When Joshua Van beat Alexandre Pantoja in a UFC flyweight title fight at UFC 331 on September 19, 2026, the judges' cards read 49-46, 48-47 and 50-45, scores that only add up over five rounds.
Gloves and hand wraps
Boxing gloves are much heavier. The ABC guidelines call for eight-ounce gloves from the lightest divisions up to welterweight (147 pounds) and ten-ounce gloves from super welterweight up. The thumb must be attached to the body of the glove to lower the risk of eye injuries, and new gloves are required for main events and title fights.
MMA gloves are small and leave the fingers free, so fighters can grab, clinch and hold submissions. Promotions supply their own within commission limits. The PFL's rulebook, for example, sets its gloves at between four and six ounces. Under the unified MMA rules, each hand can be wrapped with one roll of soft gauze up to 2 inches wide and 15 yards long, and one roll of athletic tape up to 1.25 inches wide and 10 feet long, which cannot cover the knuckles.
Knockdowns, counts and stoppages
This is the biggest difference in how a fight ends. Under the ABC boxing rules, a knockdown is called when a legal punch makes a boxer touch the floor with anything other than the feet, or leaves the boxer hanging on the ropes unable to defend. The opponent goes to the furthest neutral corner, and the referee gives a mandatory eight count. The downed boxer then has until ten to get up without help. The unified boxing rules also say that there is no standing eight count, that there is no three-knockdown rule, and that a boxer who has been knocked down cannot be saved by the bell in any round. A boxer knocked out of the ring gets a count of 20 to climb back in.
MMA has no count at all. A fighter who is dropped can be followed to the mat and hit, and the referee steps in when that fighter is no longer defending intelligently. The unified MMA rules list the ways a fight can end early: knockout, technical knockout (from the referee, the ringside doctor or the corner), and submission. A submission can come from a tap, a verbal tap, or a technical submission, when a hold leaves a fighter unconscious or causes a broken or dislocated bone or joint.
After a boxing stoppage, the ABC guidelines add a minimum medical suspension: 60 days for a knockout and 30 days for a technical knockout from head blows, and at least seven days' rest after any fight.
What you are allowed to hit with
A boxer may only punch with the closed glove, above the belt. The ABC list of boxing fouls includes hitting below the navel or behind the ear, rabbit punches to the back of the head and neck, kidney punches, holding with one hand and hitting with the other, deliberately keeping a clinch, pushing, wrestling and kicking, and using the head, shoulder, knee or elbow.
MMA allows punches, kicks, knees, elbows, takedowns, throws and submissions, and its foul list is about specific targets and techniques instead. The unified MMA rules ban head butts, eye gouging, biting, hair pulling, fish hooking, strikes to the groin, throat, spine or back of the head, small joint manipulation of fingers and toes, piledrivers, and holding the fence or the opponent's shorts or gloves. Kicks and knees to the head of a grounded opponent are banned, and a fighter counts as grounded when any part of the body other than the hands or feet touches the canvas. Stomps on a grounded fighter are out too.
The grounded-fighter definition and the elbows are the two areas that changed most recently. In July 2024 the ABC removed the ban on straight-down 12-6 elbows from its unified rules and rewrote the grounded-fighter wording, asking commissions to apply both changes from November 2024.
How judges score a round
Both sports use three judges and the ten-point must system: the winner of a round gets ten points and the loser nine or fewer. The criteria differ.
Boxing judges score clean punching, effective aggressiveness, ring generalship and defense. The ABC's regulatory guidelines give 10-9 for a close round, 10-8 for a round won with a knockdown or for a clearly dominant round without one, and 10-7 for a round with two knockdowns. A single knockdown plus a point deduction against the same boxer also comes out at 10-7. Judges are told to avoid scoring a round even.
MMA judges look first at effective striking and grappling, which includes damage, takedowns, submission attempts and reversals. Effective aggressiveness and control of the fighting area only count if the first measure is even. A 10-8 round is given for a large margin in damage, dominance and duration, and a 10-7 for complete domination. MMA judges can also score a 10-10 round when neither fighter had any advantage, though the rules describe it as rare. Our explainer on how MMA judging works goes through the MMA criteria round by round.
Both rulebooks deal with fights stopped by an accidental foul in a similar way. In boxing, a fight scheduled for more than four rounds goes to the scorecards as a technical decision if it is stopped after the fourth round, and is a no decision before that. In MMA, the cut-off is two completed rounds of a three-round fight, or three of a five-round fight.
Our boxing schedule and MMA schedule list upcoming cards in each sport with start times in Eastern Time.
