A no contest is an official result that counts as neither a win, a loss, nor a draw for either fighter — it's as if, for record-keeping purposes, the fight never happened. It shows up in two very different situations: live, when an accidental foul forces a stoppage too early in the fight for the judges' scorecards to fairly decide it, and after the fact, when a state athletic commission reviews a completed result — most often because the winner failed a drug test — and changes it retroactively.
When it happens live: an accidental foul, too early
The most common path to a no contest happens during the fight itself. Fouls like an eye poke, a low blow, or an accidental headbutt are covered in detail in what's actually illegal in the UFC, but the short version is that when one of these fouls is ruled accidental and it leaves a fighter unable to continue, the referee has to stop the bout. What happens next depends entirely on timing.
If the stoppage happens before the fight has reached the halfway point of its scheduled rounds — for example, before the start of round two in a three-round fight — the result is a no contest, because the judges haven't seen enough of the fight to score it fairly. If the accidental foul happens after that halfway point, the bout instead becomes a technical decision: the judges total up the rounds scored so far and declare whoever is ahead the winner. That single distinction — before or after the halfway mark — decides whether a ruined fight ends with no result at all or with a winner declared on an incomplete scorecard.
No contest vs. technical decision vs. draw
These three outcomes get confused constantly, and the difference matters. A draw means the fight went the full scheduled distance and the judges' scorecards came out even — a complete result that both fighters' records reflect. A technical decision means the fight was cut short by an accidental foul, but late enough that the scorecards up to that point still counted. A no contest means the fight was cut short too early for the scorecards to mean anything, so no result gets recorded at all. Only one of the three — the no contest — leaves both fighters with an asterisk instead of an entry in the win-loss column.
Why an intentional foul isn't a no contest
There's a separate category worth keeping straight: when a foul is ruled intentional rather than accidental, and it's severe enough to end the fight, the result is a disqualification, not a no contest. A disqualification gives the fouled fighter an official win. The distinction the referee and commission are drawing is about intent: an accidental foul that ends a fight early is nobody's fault, so nobody gets credited or blamed, and the record stays neutral. An intentional foul is a rule violation with a responsible party, so the fighter who broke the rules loses.
How a completed result gets overturned later
A no contest doesn't only happen live — a commission can also convert an already-completed, already-scored result into a no contest well after the fight is over. The most common reason is a failed drug test. If a fighter wins a fight and then fails an anti-doping test tied to that bout — administered under the program described in how UFC drug testing works — the athletic commission that oversaw the event can strip the result and change it to a no contest once the violation is confirmed. This has happened to fighters even weeks after a card, once test results come back and get reviewed.
A second, much rarer path is a tabulation error: judges occasionally add up a scorecard incorrectly, and if that error is caught quickly enough, the commission can correct the math and, in some cases, change the outcome entirely rather than defaulting to a no contest — because unlike a doping case, a math error usually still tells you who actually won on the correct total. Formal appeals to a commission over a disputed judging decision are far more common than either of these, but they very rarely succeed; commissions are generally reluctant to second-guess a judge's read of a fight and reserve overturns for clear, provable errors rather than close, arguable ones.
What it means for the fighters — and for anyone who bet on it
Because a no contest erases the result rather than reversing it, neither fighter's official record changes: it doesn't add a loss to either side, and it doesn't add a win either, even for the fighter who was clearly winning when the fight got cut short. For a fighter who has to fight to get bonuses or new contracts, that neutrality can feel like a genuine loss of opportunity even though it costs nothing on paper. Wagers placed on a fight are typically voided and refunded when the result comes back a no contest, since neither side of the bet actually happened as scored.
The useful thing to remember watching live: a stoppage from a clear accidental foul early in a fight is very likely heading toward a no contest, while the same foul landing in the fight's second half is more likely to produce a technical decision instead — and either way, that outcome is different in kind from the athletic commission quietly rewriting a result weeks later over a drug test.