10 Shortest WWE World Championship Title Reigns
Break out the stopwatch to find out who's held WWE's top prize the least amount of time.
When the WWE talks about title reigns these days, they almost always talk about their length in days, gushing about how a superstar has held the title for 125 days, or how they’re closing in on a milestone number of days as champion.
These days, most singles champions get at least a few months with a title before someone dethrones them. It’s a far cry from the Attitude or Ruthless Aggression Eras, where titles could change almost weekly or even after a couple days. Even so, it might surprise people to realize that in a company where people still occasionally reference Bruno Sammartino’s 2,803-day reign that 18 men have held that same title for less than a week.
But it doesn’t matter, right? Whether your WWE Championship title reign lasted 500 days, 5 weeks or 5 minutes, you still go down in the record books as holding the most prestigious title in professional wrestling, alongside Bruno, Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Bret Hart, Steve Austin, The Rock… and Jinder Mahal.
What might surprise people is just how short some of these title reigns really are. When you get down to it, you’re actually breaking out a stopwatch to calculate who has the shortest run with the WWE Championship. We’re literally talking about the difference of seconds – the gap between the first- and fourth-shortest title reign is less than two minutes.
Let’s set the timer and dive in. You might be surprised at some of these. Let’s get to it…
10. (Tie) Bret Hart, Kane, Mankind & Daniel Bryan
Length of WWE Championship Reigns: 1 day
Nine men have held the WWE Championship for less than one day, but four men managed to hold onto the title for a full day (as recognized by WWE). We probably could have gotten into the time when the wrestler won the strap and time they lost it the following night, but that would be a bit excessive here.
As such, all four of these men won their titles at a Sunday night PPV and then lost the championship the following night on Raw. Bret “Hitman” Hart accomplished this “feat” first in 1997 when he won the vacant WWF Championship at In Your House 13 in a four-way match, then lost it to Psycho Sid on Raw. Kane followed in 1998 when he beat Steve Austin at King of the Ring in a First Blood match, then dropped the title back to Austin the next night.
The following year, Mankind won the title at SummerSlam by pinning Austin in a triple threat match, then lost the title to the other man in that bout, Triple H, on Raw.
It wasn’t until 2013 when we got our latest 24-hour man, when Daniel Bryan defeated Randy Orton at Night of Champions to win his second WWE Championship, only to be stripped of it the following night by The Authority.