Which pros win the Mirrorball — and who lifts their celebrity?
Derek Hough leads with 6 Mirrorball wins and +1.34 peer lift; Julianne Hough has the highest win rate among pros with 3+ seasons.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
Derek Hough leads the cleaned dataset with 6 Mirrorball wins in 17 seasons partnered (35% win rate) and a +1.34 mean lift over same-season peer couples. Valentin Chmerkovskiy is second with 3 wins; Julianne Hough posts the highest win rate among pros with 3+ seasons (40% on 2 wins in 5 seasons).
Findings
- Wins are concentrated. Derek Hough (6), Val Chmerkovskiy (3), then a cluster at 2 wins (Julianne Hough, Jenna Johnson, Witney Carson, and others in the top table).
- Lift ≠ just good celebs. Lift is each couple’s season mean judge score minus the mean of all couples that same season. Derek’s +1.34 and Val’s +0.84 show partners consistently clearing the field.
- Season 31 is missing from the winners extract (no
Winnerstag in performances); S35 is in progress. Winners for S32–34 come from contestant status text.
| Pro | Wins | Seasons | Win rate | Mean score | Mean lift | Dances |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Derek Hough | 6 | 17 | 35.3% | 8.912 | 1.344 | 207 |
| Valentin Chmerkovskiy | 3 | 17 | 17.6% | 8.671 | 0.838 | 171 |
| Julianne Hough | 2 | 5 | 40.0% | 8.373 | 0.614 | 51 |
| Jenna Johnson | 2 | 6 | 33.3% | 8.030 | 0.375 | 55 |
| Witney Carson | 2 | 13 | 15.4% | 8.300 | 0.162 | 116 |
| Kym Johnson | 2 | 14 | 14.3% | 7.954 | -0.008 | 116 |
| Peta Murgatroyd | 2 | 14 | 14.3% | 7.824 | -0.484 | 107 |
| Mark Ballas | 2 | 20 | 10.0% | 8.638 | 0.721 | 195 |
| Cheryl Burke | 2 | 25 | 8.0% | 8.123 | 0.268 | 233 |
| Daniella Karagach | 1 | 3 | 33.3% | 7.911 | 0.488 | 30 |
| Alec Mazo | 1 | 5 | 20.0% | 7.400 | -0.261 | 25 |
| Alan Bersten | 1 | 9 | 11.1% | 8.283 | 0.575 | 70 |
Methods & caveats
Mirrorball winners = performance rows whose result matches /^Winners/ (plus S32–34 status “Winners…”). Season 1 keeps Kelly Monaco only (John O’Hurley also tagged Winners in source data). Lift = couple season mean − season peer mean. Pros with fewer than 3 seasons partnered are excluded from the rate table.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
