diff --git a/lucene/CHANGES.txt b/lucene/CHANGES.txt
index 661377f4661..cb969eb3388 100644
--- a/lucene/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/lucene/CHANGES.txt
@@ -52,6 +52,8 @@ Improvements
 
 * LUCENE-8937: Avoid agressive stemming on numbers in the FrenchMinimalStemmer.
   (Adrien Gallou via Tomoko Uchida)
+  
+* LUCENE-8984: MoreLikeThis MLT is biased for uncommon fields (Andy Hind via Anshum Gupta)
 
 Bug fixes
 
diff --git a/lucene/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/MoreLikeThis.java b/lucene/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/MoreLikeThis.java
index 4fb6c4f410e..709e56fc5e3 100644
--- a/lucene/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/MoreLikeThis.java
+++ b/lucene/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/MoreLikeThis.java
@@ -650,13 +650,17 @@ public final class MoreLikeThis {
    */
   private PriorityQueue<ScoreTerm> createQueue(Map<String, Map<String, Int>> perFieldTermFrequencies) throws IOException {
     // have collected all words in doc and their freqs
-    int numDocs = ir.numDocs();
     final int limit = Math.min(maxQueryTerms, this.getTermsCount(perFieldTermFrequencies));
     FreqQ queue = new FreqQ(limit); // will order words by score
     for (Map.Entry<String, Map<String, Int>> entry : perFieldTermFrequencies.entrySet()) {
       Map<String, Int> perWordTermFrequencies = entry.getValue();
       String fieldName = entry.getKey();
 
+      long numDocs = ir.getDocCount(fieldName);
+      if(numDocs == -1) {
+        numDocs = ir.numDocs();
+      }
+
       for (Map.Entry<String, Int> tfEntry : perWordTermFrequencies.entrySet()) { // for every word
         String word = tfEntry.getKey();
         int tf = tfEntry.getValue().x; // term freq in the source doc
diff --git a/lucene/queries/src/test/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/TestMoreLikeThis.java b/lucene/queries/src/test/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/TestMoreLikeThis.java
index 2061068bc72..eb21d1effe1 100644
--- a/lucene/queries/src/test/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/TestMoreLikeThis.java
+++ b/lucene/queries/src/test/org/apache/lucene/queries/mlt/TestMoreLikeThis.java
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@ import java.util.Arrays;
 import java.util.Collection;
 import java.util.HashMap;
 import java.util.HashSet;
+import java.util.List;
 import java.util.Locale;
 import java.util.Map;
 
@@ -130,6 +131,60 @@ public class TestMoreLikeThis extends LuceneTestCase {
     writer.addDocument(doc);
   }
 
+  public void testSmallSampleFromCorpus() throws Throwable {
+    // add series of docs with terms of decreasing df
+    Directory dir = newDirectory();
+    RandomIndexWriter writer = new RandomIndexWriter(random(), dir);
+    for (int i = 0; i < 1980; i++) {
+      Document doc = new Document();
+      doc.add(newTextField("text", "filler", Field.Store.YES));
+      writer.addDocument(doc);
+    }
+    for (int i = 0; i < 18; i++) {
+      Document doc = new Document();
+      doc.add(newTextField("one_percent", "all", Field.Store.YES));
+      writer.addDocument(doc);
+    }
+    for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++) {
+      Document doc = new Document();
+      doc.add(newTextField("one_percent", "all", Field.Store.YES));
+      doc.add(newTextField("one_percent", "tenth", Field.Store.YES));
+      writer.addDocument(doc);
+    }
+    IndexReader reader = writer.getReader();
+    writer.close();
+
+    // setup MLT query
+    MoreLikeThis mlt = new MoreLikeThis(reader);
+    Analyzer analyzer = new MockAnalyzer(random(), MockTokenizer.WHITESPACE, false);
+    mlt.setAnalyzer(analyzer);
+    mlt.setMaxQueryTerms(3);
+    mlt.setMinDocFreq(1);
+    mlt.setMinTermFreq(1);
+    mlt.setMinWordLen(1);
+    mlt.setFieldNames(new String[]{"one_percent"});
+
+    BooleanQuery query = (BooleanQuery) mlt.like("one_percent", new StringReader("tenth tenth all"));
+    Collection<BooleanClause> clauses = query.clauses();
+
+    assertTrue(clauses.size() == 2);
+    Term term = ((TermQuery) ((List<BooleanClause>) clauses).get(0).getQuery()).getTerm();
+    assertTrue(term.text().equals("all"));
+    term = ((TermQuery) ((List<BooleanClause>) clauses).get(1).getQuery()).getTerm();
+    assertTrue(term.text().equals("tenth"));
+
+
+    query = (BooleanQuery) mlt.like("one_percent", new StringReader("tenth all all"));
+    clauses = query.clauses();
+
+    assertTrue(clauses.size() == 2);
+    term = ((TermQuery) ((List<BooleanClause>) clauses).get(0).getQuery()).getTerm();
+    assertTrue(term.text().equals("all"));
+    term = ((TermQuery) ((List<BooleanClause>) clauses).get(1).getQuery()).getTerm();
+    assertTrue(term.text().equals("tenth"));
+
+  }
+
   public void testBoostFactor() throws Throwable {
     Map<String,Float> originalValues = getOriginalValues();
     mlt.setFieldNames(new String[] {"text"});
diff --git a/solr/CHANGES.txt b/solr/CHANGES.txt
index 8fb9bcc007b..b1fa38c1802 100644
--- a/solr/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/solr/CHANGES.txt
@@ -66,6 +66,11 @@ Upgrade Notes
 
 * SOLR-13593 SOLR-13690 SOLR-13691: Allow to look up analyzer components by their SPI names in field type configuration. (Tomoko Uchida)
 
+Improvements
+----------------------
+
+* LUCENE-8984: MoreLikeThis MLT is biased for uncommon fields (Andy Hind via Anshum Gupta)
+
 Other Changes
 ----------------------