Boxing weight classes explained

The short answer, and why it is not one table

Professional boxing has seventeen weight divisions between 105 pounds and unlimited, and the four bodies that sanction world titles agree on every limit from 105 to 200. That is the sentence most articles stop at, and as far as it goes it is true.

It stops one step too early. A weight class is three separate things that people treat as one: a number, a name, and a rule set attached to that number. The numbers are nearly universal. The names are organisational dialects. And the rule sets — when you weigh, how many times, how much you may weigh the following morning, what happens if you miss — are where the four bodies diverge most and where the consequences actually land on a fighter.

The naming layer is the one that generates the most confusion and matters the least. The rule layer is the one nobody writes about and it is the one that decides whether your camp plan is legal. A boxer preparing for an IBF title fight has a fight-morning weight ceiling written into the sanctioning body's own rules. The same boxer, same weight, fighting for a WBO belt, has no such ceiling from the WBO at all — only whatever the promoter negotiated into the contract and whatever the local commission requires.

So the honest answer to "what are boxing's weight classes" is: here is the table, and here are the four places the table is not the whole story.

The professional division table, in pounds and kilograms

The limits below are read from the WBC's published male weight scale, the IBF's Rules Governing Championship Contests, the WBO's Regulations of World Championship Contests, and the IBF's second-day weigh-in guidelines of January 2021. All four were retrieved on 24 August 2026.

The kilogram column is the exact conversion at 0.45359237 kg per pound, rounded to three decimals. It does not always match what the bodies print, and where it does not, the mismatch is noted below the table rather than smoothed over.

Four things about that table are worth stating explicitly.

The WBA column carries names, not limits, and that is deliberate. The WBA's own rulebook contains no weight table. It says instead that "the weight divisions identified and published by the Ratings Committee are the official weight class designations for the Association" — the classes are whatever the rankings publish this month. The names above are taken from the WBA's current champions page as it stood on 24 August 2026.

The 102 lb row exists in exactly one document we found: the IBF's second-day weigh-in guidelines, where it appears as "Jr. Mini Flyweight (Female Only)". It is not in the IBF's own championship rulebook, which begins at 105.

Bridgerweight is a WBC division. The WBC announced it on 10 November 2020 for "the large number of boxers who are between 200 and 224 pounds", named after a six-year-old boy, and its weight scale now sets the limit at 224 lb with heavyweight beginning above that. The IBF and WBO rulebooks do not contain it. The WBA's champions page listed a bridgerweight title holder on the day we checked — carrying a WBA Gold belt, with the same boxer also holding the WBA Gold heavyweight title — while the WBA's own world rankings page listed seventeen male divisions and no bridgerweight table at all.

And the printed kilogram figures are not always right. The IBF's second-day guidelines list junior featherweight as "122 lbs. or 55.388 Kg". The exact conversion is 55.338 kg; the WBC's scale and the WBO's regulations both print the correct value. It is a fifty-gram transcription error in a governing document, which matters less for making weight than for what it tells you about how these tables are maintained.

Why the same weight has three different names

The naming split is historical, not technical, and once you know the rule it stops being confusing.

The WBC's own account of the history, published on its website, is that the National Sporting Club in England created eight original divisions — fly 112, bantam 118, feather 126, light 135, welter 147, middle 160, light heavy 175, and heavy above that. The New York commission added three more in 1909 at 122, 130 and 140. The WBC then added six of its own, including 105, 108, 154, 168 and 200, on the stated grounds that the gaps between the old divisions were large enough to demand "great physical sacrifices with dangerous practices of dehydration".

Every one of those additions sits between two existing classes, and that is the whole problem. A new class at 130 pounds is above featherweight and below lightweight. You can name it relative to the class beneath — super featherweight — or relative to the class above — junior lightweight. Both are accurate. The WBC and WBA took the first convention. The IBF and WBO took the second.

The mapping is mechanical: super X is the class immediately above X, junior Y is the class immediately below Y, and for every intermediate division those two labels land on the same number. Super featherweight equals junior lightweight equals 130 lb. Super welterweight equals junior middleweight equals 154 lb. Super flyweight equals junior bantamweight equals 115 lb. There is no conversion to do and no ambiguity to resolve.

Three exceptions are worth memorising because they break the pattern. At 168 lb, all four bodies say super middleweight — the IBF and WBO abandon the junior convention there, because "junior light heavyweight" was never adopted. At 105 lb the names diverge without any system at all: strawweight to the WBC, minimumweight to the WBA, miniflyweight to the IBF, mini flyweight to the WBO. And at 200 lb the WBO alone calls it junior heavyweight while everyone else says cruiserweight.

The practical consequence is small but real. If you are reading a contract, a sanction request or a ranking, read the number and ignore the noun. If you are searching for opponents or records, search both names. And if someone tells you a fighter moved up from junior welterweight to welterweight, they moved from 140 to 147 — the same move a WBC document would describe as super lightweight to welterweight.

Where the four bodies actually disagree

Names are cosmetic. These four disagreements are not.

Where heavyweight begins. The WBC's scale says heavyweight is "Over 224 With no Limit". The IBF's rulebook says "over 200 lbs." The WBO's says "Over 200 lbs or 90.72 kgs." A 210-pound boxer is a heavyweight to two of the four bodies and a bridgerweight to the third. This is not a naming difference; it is a different sport at that weight, because it changes who your mandatory challenger is.

When you weigh in. The WBC requires the final official weigh-in "no less than 24 hours but not more than 30 hours prior" to the bout. The IBF requires it "no less than twenty (20) nor more than thirty (30) hours before the scheduled start of the first bout on the bout card". The WBA requires it "between 16 and 36 hours before the bout" — a twenty-hour window, the loosest of the four. The WBO's Section 4 sets no timing at all; it describes what happens at the official weigh-in without saying when it occurs, leaving that to the promoter and the local commission.

Sixteen hours versus thirty-six hours is not a detail. It is the difference between one overnight recovery window and two, and it is set by which belt is on the line before anyone has agreed a date.

Whether there is a second weigh-in. The IBF has one written into its rules. The WBC has a day-of-bout weigh-in at the arena governed by its Weight Management Program. The WBO and WBA rulebooks contain no fight-day weigh-in provision that we found.

What missing weight costs. All four strip a champion on the scales and all four give a two-hour extension. Beyond that they part company. The WBA sets an explicit financial tariff: a boxer who misses after the two-hour extension "shall forfeit 35% of his purse, with 25% going to the promoter and 10% to his opponent", rising to 45% for a boxer who refuses to attempt to make weight at all. The WBC, IBF and WBO rulebooks describe the sporting consequences — title forfeited on the scale, bout may proceed for the vacant title, an overweight challenger cannot win the belt — without a fixed purse percentage.

Seventeen divisions, and what that does to a cut

Boxing's division ladder is unusually dense, and the density is the point.

For comparison, the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports lists fifteen weight classes in its Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, August 2025 revision, running from atomweight at up to 105 lb to super heavyweight above 265. Over the range where the two sports overlap most — 105 to 175 pounds — boxing offers fifteen stops and MMA offers nine. Boxing's average step in that range is five pounds. MMA's is closer to nine.

That has a direct and underappreciated effect on weight cutting, and it cuts in both directions.

The optimistic reading: a denser ladder means a boxer who cannot make a class has somewhere to go that is only three to seven pounds away, rather than ten. Moving up in boxing costs less relative size than moving up in MMA. That was the WBC's stated reason for creating divisions in the first place — the gaps demanded dangerous dehydration or a large size concession, and narrower gaps reduce both.

The pessimistic reading, and the one the data supports: a denser ladder also means the class below you is only three to seven pounds away, and the sport's economics reward being the bigger fighter in the smaller class. The empirical picture in professional boxing is not one of modest cuts. Murugappan and colleagues analysed official weight data from 399 male professional boxers collected by the California State Athletic Commission between 2015 and 2018 and found that 389 of them — 97.5% — gained weight between the official weigh-in and competition. The mean gain was 4.4 ± 2.2 kg, or 7.2 ± 3.5% of weigh-in weight. Boxers competing in international promotions gained significantly more than regional competitors, 8.0 ± 3.0% against 6.6 ± 3.7%, and 82 athletes — one in five — came back at 10% above their weigh-in weight or more.

An earlier study of IBF title fights makes the pattern sharper still. Daniele and colleagues took official weigh-in reports from 71 IBF fights, 142 fighters, and measured the gain between the first weigh-in and the IBF's second. The average was 2.52 ± 1.37 kg, 3.8 ± 2.2% of initial body weight, with a maximum weight discrepancy between opponents of 7.10 kg. They found a significant negative correlation between a boxer's first weight and their weight gain, both absolute (r = -0.278, p = 0.001) and relative (r = -0.497, p < 0.0001). Lighter boxers regained proportionally more.

That last finding is the one to sit with. The divisions are narrowest at the bottom of the ladder — three pounds between strawweight and light flyweight — and it is precisely at the bottom that the proportional regains are largest. A fixed pound-based tolerance is a far bigger percentage for a 105-pound fighter than for a 200-pound one, and so is a fixed pound-based mistake. If you want the physiological side of that argument, the graded figures in the literature are set out in how much weight you can cut before a fight.

The WBC weight management programme, read from the document

The WBC's Weight Management Program is the most-cited weight-cutting rule in boxing and the least accurately described. Here is what the programme document says, from the copy hosted by the Association of Boxing Commissions.

The programme began effective 1 January 2019. The document is a presentation deck from the WBC's Nutrition and Weight Management Committee covering the 2019–20 period, not a rulebook chapter, which is itself worth knowing before you quote it.

Its operative slide lists four elements. Mandatory disclosure: the promoter must require each boxer to submit the boxer's precise weight to the WBC at the time of signing the bout. A "Safety weigh-in 30-14-7", set out as "30 day (10%); 14 day (5%); 7 day (3%)". A "Weigh-in on site the day of the fight", listed as "On site (10%)". And a penalty schedule: a warning; fines of up to $5,000; withdrawal of sanctioning of the bout; and up to 30% penalty on the purse.

The 30-14-7 schedule now also appears in the WBC's Rules & Regulations proper. Rule 4.14, Safety Weigh-Ins, in the version published on the WBC's own Rules and Documents page as of 24 August 2026, requires additional official safety weigh-ins "30, 14, and 7 days prior to the official 30-24-hour weigh-in for non-heavyweight boxers", at 10%, 5% and 3% respectively. Rule 4.15 then incorporates the Weight Management Program protocol by reference and describes a day-of-the-bout weigh-in, without restating the 10% figure — that number lives in the programme document, not the rulebook.

Two provenance warnings. First, an older WBC rulebook is still reachable on the same domain, dated "amended and approved 13 Dec 2011", whose Rule 4.14 specifies checks at 30 and 7 days only, at 10% and 5%. If you land on that file you will read a superseded schedule with no indication that it is superseded. Second, the WBC's own downloadable "Mandatory Weigh-In for WBC Title Bouts" certification form still has fields for a 30-day and a 7-day check and a 24-hour maximum — no 14-day row. The scale, the rulebook and the form are three artefacts of the same rule at three different stages of updating.

What the WBC's published male weight scale does supply is the arithmetic done for you. For lightweight at 135 lb the ceilings are 149 lb at 30 days, 142 lb at 14 days and 139 lb at 7 days. For welterweight at 147 lb they are 162, 154 and 151. For middleweight at 160 lb they are 176, 168 and 165. Those are the numbers a WBC representative, a commission executive or a doctor is asked to certify.

Note what the programme is and is not. It is an information mechanism. It does not prevent dehydration; it makes a boxer's walking-around weight visible early enough that an unsurvivable cut can be caught before the fight is finalised. Whether it is enforced consistently across every affiliated country is not something we could verify from the document.

The IBF second-day weigh-in: boxing's only rehydration rule

The IBF is the only one of the four bodies with a fight-day weight ceiling in its own rules, and it is the single most consequential division-related rule in the sport.

The IBF's championship rules require a second weigh-in "between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. on the morning of the event, unless otherwise approved by the IBF", at which "boxers cannot weigh more than ten (10) pounds over the weight limit". Miss it and there is a two-hour extension; miss that and a champion forfeits the title on the scale exactly as at the first weigh-in, and a challenger who fails cannot win the belt.

That flat ten-pound figure was superseded for most bouts by a guidelines document from the IBF Office of the President, which states that "the following second day weigh-in guidelines shall apply to all IBF Championships sanctioned after January 19, 2021" and that "these guidelines shall not apply to Unification bouts". It replaces the flat ten pounds with a sliding scale:

The percentage column is ours, not the IBF's, and it is the interesting part. In absolute pounds the allowance grows with the division. As a percentage of the limit it shrinks — from 9.8% at 102 lb to 7.0% at 200 lb. The smallest fighters get the most proportional room to rehydrate.

Set that beside Daniele's finding that lighter boxers regain proportionally more, and the scale looks well-aimed. We could not locate any published IBF rationale for the specific figures, so whether that alignment is designed or coincidental is not something this article can tell you.

The unification exemption has a history worth knowing. ESPN reported in August 2017 that the IBF dropped same-day weight checks for unified title fights, quoting then-president Daryl Peoples that some fighters were not participating in the second-day weigh-ins and that those who complied were disadvantaged by weight disparities on fight day. The trigger was Gennady Golovkin against Daniel Jacobs in March 2017, where Jacobs skipped the morning weigh-in and forfeited his right to fight for the IBF belt.

Day-before, same-day, and the clause that is not a rule

Professional boxing at world level is a day-before sport. All four bodies that specify a timing put the official weigh-in the day before the bout, and the tightest of them, the WBC, requires between 24 and 30 hours. Same-day weigh-ins are not part of the modern championship game.

That creates an overnight window, and the window is where the sport's real weight problem lives. It is also where the most misunderstood mechanism in boxing sits: the rehydration clause.

A rehydration clause is a term in a bout contract that caps what a fighter may weigh at a second, private weigh-in the following morning. It is not issued by a sanctioning body, it is not part of any rulebook, and it is enforced by money rather than by title forfeiture. The clearest documented example: CBS Sports reported that Daniel Jacobs weighed 173.6 lb against a contracted 170 lb ceiling before his middleweight unification bout with Canelo Alvarez on 4 May 2019, and paid $250,000 per pound over. The fight went ahead and his IBF championship status was unaffected — because it was a unification bout, and the IBF's own second-day rule does not apply to those.

That single case demonstrates the whole structure. There were two rehydration limits in play, one contractual and one regulatory, and only the contractual one bound him.

Whether these clauses are a safety measure or a negotiating weapon depends entirely on who wrote the contract. A clause that stops a fighter dropping two divisions and rehydrating into a third is doing something a rulebook does not. A clause imposed by an A-side on an opponent who then has to arrive drained is doing something else. Both look identical on paper. That ambiguity is the reason no sanctioning body has generalised the practice, and it is why the IBF's version — published, uniform, applied to everyone at a given weight — is a materially different instrument from a privately negotiated number.

What the commission says, and why it may not match the belt

Your bout is licensed by a public athletic commission and sanctioned, if it is a title fight, by a private body. They have separate rules and separate tables, and the commission's is the one with legal force.

Nevada's regulation, NAC 467.476, sets out its own boxing schedule: strawweight up to 105, then classes at 108, 112, 115, 118, 122, 126, 130, 135, 140, 147, 154, 160, 168 and 175 — and then cruiserweight as "over 175 to 195 lbs." with heavyweight as "all over 195 lbs." Nevada's cruiserweight ends five pounds below everybody else's, and its heavyweight begins twenty-nine pounds below the WBC's.

New York, at 19 NYCRR 211.6, publishes a different table again. It begins at junior flyweight, "Up to and including 108 pounds", with no 105 lb class at all — sixteen classes rather than seventeen. It uses the junior convention throughout, sets cruiserweight at over 175 to 200, and heavyweight above 200.

Both regulations add something the sanctioning bodies do not: a permitted weight difference between opponents. New York allows not more than 3 pounds up to bantamweight, rising through 4, 5 and 7 pounds to not more than 12 at cruiserweight, and no limit at heavyweight. Nevada's schedule runs from not more than 3 pounds up to 118 lb through to not more than 20 pounds between 175 and 195, and no limit above 195. This is the actual regulatory instrument governing mismatches, and it is a commission rule, not a sanctioning-body one.

Two further commission provisions deserve to be better known. Nevada's NAC 467.476 states that after the weigh-in "weight loss in excess of 2 pounds is not permitted", and that any such loss "must not occur later than 1 hour after the initial weigh-in". And New York's 19 NYCRR 208.14 reads, in full:

No professional boxer or professional mixed martial artist shall participate in any contest or exhibition following weight loss of one percent or more of body weight within 24 hours prior to such contest or exhibition, unless otherwise authorized by the commission. A combatant may be disapproved for participation in a match or exhibition if, in the professional medical opinion of the reviewing physician, it would be unsafe for the combatant to compete in the match or exhibition due to a finding of dehydration or extreme weight loss.

A one percent cap on weight loss in the final 24 hours before competing is, on its face, one of the strictest weight rules in combat sports anywhere. How it is applied in practice, and how often the "otherwise authorized" exception is exercised, is not something we could establish from the regulation text.

The practical instruction is short. Before you plan anything, get the current rule set from both the commission licensing your bout and the body sanctioning it, in writing, and check the two against each other. The wider picture of how commissions and federations regulate this is the subject of the rules and weight classes material.

Amateur boxing is a different problem on the scale

Olympic and amateur boxing under World Boxing does not work like the professional game in any respect that matters to a weight plan.

Since 1 January 2025 the elite men's categories under World Boxing's Competition Rules are ten: 47–50 kg, 50–55, 55–60, 60–65, 65–70, 70–75, 75–80, 80–85, 85–90 and over 90. The elite women's categories are also ten: 45–48 kg, 48–51, 51–54, 54–57, 57–60, 60–65, 65–70, 70–75, 75–80 and over 80.

Read those ranges again. Every amateur category has a minimum as well as a maximum. World Boxing's rule 5.6.6 states that at a boxer's first official weigh-in of a competition, the weight must exceed the minimum limit of the category, and weighing in below it "results in a walkover in favour of the Boxer's scheduled opponent". In professional boxing there is no floor — a welterweight may weigh 130 lb if they like. In amateur boxing, being too light loses you the fight.

The weigh-in format is different in three more ways. Weigh-ins take place in the mornings during competition days and "Boxers are required to make weight on the day they box" — every day they box, not once for the tournament. A boxer "is allowed to be present at the official scales only once", so there is no two-hour extension and no second attempt. And the time from the end of the daily weigh-in to the first bout of the day "must not be less than three (3) hours".

Three hours is the entire recovery window, repeated on every competition day. Any protocol borrowed from the professional day-before format is being misapplied at that point, and by a wide margin.

For the Olympics themselves, World Boxing announced on 10 April 2025 that the IOC had confirmed seven weight classes for both men and women at LA28, with 248 quota places split equally, and that World Boxing would manage the competition and qualification pathway. The men's categories are 50–55 kg, 55–60, 60–65, 65–70, 70–80, 80–90 and over 90; the women's are 48–51 kg, 51–54, 54–57, 57–60, 60–65, 65–70 and 70–75. Those are subsets of the wider World Boxing ladder, which is why an athlete can be a World Boxing cruiserweight at 85 kg and have no Olympic category of their own.

Catchweight: a word that appears in no rulebook

We searched the full text of the WBC Rules & Regulations, the WBC Synthesized Rules for Championship Fights, the WBA Rules, the IBF Rules Governing Championship Contests, the WBO Regulations of World Championship Contests and the World Boxing Competition Rules. The word "catchweight" does not appear in any of them.

That absence is the answer to most questions about catchweights. A catchweight bout in boxing is simply a bout contracted at a weight that is not a division limit. It is a private agreement between two fighters and a promoter, given effect by the commission that approves the bout agreement, and it exists outside the sanctioning bodies' division structure rather than inside it.

The consequences follow directly. A world title cannot be contested at a weight the sanctioning body does not recognise, because the body only sanctions championships in its listed categories — the WBO's regulations, for instance, state that world championships "shall be recognized in the following weight categories", and a contracted 158 lb is not among them. What can and does happen is that a champion takes a non-title catchweight bout, or that a bout is contracted at a catchweight and a title is at stake for only one of the two fighters, or that a fighter who misses weight turns what was a title fight into a one-sided-title fight under the missed-weight rules described above.

The regulatory limit on catchweights is the commission's weight-difference schedule, not the sanctioning body. In New York, a catchweight bout still has to fall within the permitted difference for the relevant class unless the commission waives it, and a waiver requires both competitors to be within the same class and to consent in writing.

It is worth contrasting this with MMA, where the ABC's Unified Rules do address the subject directly: if a fighter misses the contracted weight and the two competitors end up in different classes, "the heavier opponent shall not exceed five (5) lbs. of the lower weighing fighter", and for contracted catchweights there is no spread allowance so long as both are below the contracted weight, with commissions free to deny the bout on safety grounds. Boxing has no equivalent published rule from its sanctioning bodies.

Reading the table as a planning document

Once you have the right table for your bout, three numbers determine your camp, and only one of them is the division limit.

The first is the weigh-in timing under the body sanctioning your fight. Sixteen hours under the WBA's minimum and thirty-six hours under its maximum are two different recovery problems, and the WBO leaves the question to the promoter. That number belongs in a plan before any target weight does.

The second is whether a fight-morning ceiling applies to you. If you are fighting for an IBF title outside a unification bout, there is one, it is published, and it is between 10 and 14 pounds depending on your division. If your contract contains a rehydration clause, there is one and it is whatever was negotiated. If neither applies, there is no ceiling other than the commission's own dehydration provisions — which in New York is a one percent limit on loss in the final 24 hours, and in Nevada is a two-pound limit on loss after the weigh-in.

The third is the check-weight schedule. A WBC title fight brings certified weigh-ins at 30, 14 and 7 days with published ceilings, and the WBA's medical guidelines add their own line: "If a boxer is more than 5% overweight 5 days before a fight, he should not be allowed to dehydrate himself and should not be permitted to fight." A camp that intends to be 12% over at ten days out has already failed a check it may not have known existed.

Those three numbers are knowable months ahead, and none of them is physiological. They are administrative facts about your bout, and the most common planning error in boxing is treating them as details to sort out in fight week rather than as constraints that shape the whole descent. Building the plan backwards from a known weigh-in date is the entire logic of fight camp planning, and it is what Fighter Cut is built to do — take the date and the target, and lay out the weeks between now and then.

What we could not verify

Stated plainly, because a page this full of numbers owes you its gaps:

• The WBA's official division limits. The WBA rulebook contains no weight table and delegates the designations to its Ratings Committee. The names in our table come from the WBA's champions page as it stood on 24 August 2026; the pound and kilogram figures in that row are from the other three bodies, not from the WBA.
• The WBA's bridgerweight status. Its champions page listed a bridgerweight title holder on the day we checked; its world rankings page listed no bridgerweight division. We could not reconcile the two from WBA documents, and we did not find a dated WBA resolution establishing the division.
• Female division tables. The WBC document we retrieved is titled the WBC Male Weight Scale. We did not locate an equivalent published female scale, and the only female-specific limit we found in any primary document is the IBF's 102 lb Jr. Mini Flyweight in its second-day guidelines. Women's divisions are not covered by this article's table beyond the shared names.
• Whether the WBC programme is applied uniformly. The document describes surprise testing, all affiliated countries and permanent weight control of ranked boxers. We found no published compliance data and are not in a position to say how consistently any of it happens.
• The history of the day-before weigh-in. The commonly repeated account is that day-before weigh-ins spread from Nevada in the mid-1980s on medical advice. We could not source that to a commission record or a dated regulation this session, so it is not stated as fact anywhere above.
• The IBF's rationale for its sliding second-day scale. The figures are published; an explanation of how they were chosen is not, as far as we could find.
• Amendment status. Rules change without announcement, and this page is a snapshot of 24 August 2026. The WBC's own site currently serves two rulebooks with contradictory safety weigh-in schedules. Verify the current text with the commission licensing your bout and the body sanctioning it before you rely on any number here.

Sources

Sourced to

1. WBC Male Weight Scale / WBC Safety Weight Scale (30, 14, 7, and Official) — World Boxing Council, Rules and Documents, retrieved 24 August 2026
2. Rules & Regulations of the World Boxing Council — World Boxing Council, current version served from the WBC Rules and Documents page, retrieved 24 August 2026
3. WBC Synthesized Rules for Championship Fights — World Boxing Council, retrieved 24 August 2026
4. Weight Management Program, World Boxing Council 2019-20 — World Boxing Council Nutrition and Weight Management Committee, hosted by the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, programme effective 1 January 2019
5. Rules & Regulations of the World Boxing Council, amended and approved 13 Dec 2011 — World Boxing Council, superseded version still served from the WBC domain, retrieved 24 August 2026
6. A New Weight Division: Bridgerweight — Mauricio Sulaiman, World Boxing Council, 10 November 2020
7. IBF Rules Governing Championship Contests — International Boxing Federation, posted and effective January 2019
8. Second Day Weigh-In Guidelines — International Boxing Federation, Office of the President, applying to IBF championships sanctioned after 19 January 2021
9. WBO Regulations of World Championship Contests — World Boxing Organization, October 2021 edition, retrieved 24 August 2026
10. WBA Rules, as amended at Directorate Meeting in Orlando, Florida, December 2022 and April 2024 — World Boxing Association
11. Current WBA Champions — World Boxing Association, retrieved 24 August 2026
12. World Boxing Competition Rules, in force November 2024 — World Boxing, approved November 2024
13. IOC confirms gender parity in boxing at LA28 with seven weight classes for both men and women — World Boxing, 10 April 2025
14. Nevada Administrative Code Chapter 467, including NAC 467.476 Boxers: Weight classes; weight differences; weight loss after weigh-in — Nevada Legislature, Nevada Athletic Commission regulations, retrieved 24 August 2026
15. 19 NYCRR 211.6, Weighing in — New York State Athletic Commission, New York Codes Rules and Regulations, last updated 19 November 2025
16. 19 NYCRR 208.14, Weight loss — New York State Athletic Commission, via Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
17. Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts — Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, August 2025 revision
18. Rapid weight gain following weight cutting in male professional boxers — Murugappan KR, Reale R, Baribeau V, O'Gara BP, Mueller A, Sarge T, The Physician and Sportsmedicine, 2022 Dec;50(6):494-500. DOI 10.1080/00913847.2021.1960780, PMID 34310264
19. Rapid weight gain in professional boxing and correlation with fight decisions: analysis from 71 title fights — Daniele G, Weinstein RN, Wallace PW, Palmieri V, Bianco M, The Physician and Sportsmedicine, 2016 Nov;44(4):349-354. DOI 10.1080/00913847.2016.1228421, PMID 27564844
20. WBC introduces weight management program with eye on fighter health — ESPN, 8 January 2019, reporting the WBC programme
21. IBF cuts same-day weight checks for unified title fights — Dan Rafael, ESPN, 22 August 2017
22. Daniel Jacobs misses rehydration weight limit for Canelo Alvarez fight, fined for each pound over — Brian Campbell, CBS Sports, 4 May 2019

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