The honest version of luxury watches investment 2026 goes like this: the secondary market had a very good half-year, and almost none of that reached the watches most people actually own. EveryWatch counted $10.5 billion of secondhand sales in the first half of 2026, up 37.2% year on year, with Rolex alone taking $4.29 billion of it. That is trading volume. It is not return.
Prices are a separate line. The WatchCharts Overall Market Index rose 1.5% in the second quarter of 2026, its fourth straight quarter above +1%, and it sits a long way under the March 2022 peak that most “watches as assets” articles were written at the top of. Secondhand prices had fallen more than 31% off that peak by August 2023. A market can be busy and flat at once. This one is.
Article Overview
Luxury watches investment 2026, by the numbers
EveryWatch pulled its H1 figures from 650 dealers and roughly 500 auction houses, so the shape is reliable even where the decimals aren’t. Rolex took 41% of all secondary value. Patek Philippe did $1.51 billion, Audemars Piguet $983 million. Between them the Big Three moved something close to two thirds of every dollar that changed hands.
The genuinely interesting number is smaller. Independent makers together sold $633.8 million on the secondary market, up 89%, which put them ahead of LVMH’s entire watch portfolio at $617 million. F.P. Journe alone did $201.6 million. That is the money voting for scarcity it can verify, from houses that make a few hundred watches a year rather than a few hundred thousand.
Quarterly price moves ran in the same order but at a fraction of the size: Patek +2.2%, AP +1.5%, Rolex +1.0%. Nobody is getting rich at 1% a quarter.
The Submariner is the market’s savings account
Rolex raised US list prices about 7% on 1 January 2026. The no-date Submariner 124060 went from $9,500 to $10,050 in a single step, and the Daytona 126500LN from $16,000 to $16,900. Every “my Rolex appreciated” story from the past year has that increase sitting underneath it, doing most of the work.
| Reference | 124060 (Submariner, no date) |
| Case | 41mm Oystersteel, 300m |
| Movement | Calibre 3230, 70h power reserve |
| List | $10,050 (1 January 2026, US) |
| Secondary | roughly $11,500–$13,000 unworn or lightly worn (June 2026) |
So the premium over list is around 15% to 25%, down from the roughly $16,000 that clean examples touched at the 2022 top. The Submariner did not fail. It did what a liquid asset does in a normalising market: it gave back the froth and kept the floor. What you are buying at $12,000 is not upside. It is the ability to sell the thing in a week, anywhere on earth, at a price you can look up beforehand. That is worth paying for. It just isn’t a trade.
What the Nautilus 5711 proves, and what it doesn’t
Patek discontinued the steel Nautilus 5711/1A in 2021 at a last list price of about $34,893. A clean example with box and papers now trades somewhere between $130,000 and $160,000. Nothing else in modern watchmaking has run like it.
Read that as a return and it’s roughly four times money in five years. Read it as a transaction and it collapses, because the trade required buying at list, and buying at list required an allocation from a boutique that had a decade of your purchase history on file. The people who made 4x were not investors. They were customers, and the boutique chose them.
The 5711 went to people who had an allocation, not to people who had money.
The white gold 5811/1G that replaced it lists around $89,767 and trades at roughly $150,000 to $190,000, so the pattern survived the reference change. Thierry Stern has said there will be no steel 5811. That is the supply side telling you plainly that the 5711 story is closed rather than repeatable. Buying one at $140,000 today isn’t entering the trade. It’s paying the person who did.
The Royal Oak is the one still moving
Audemars Piguet restricts steel harder than anyone, and the secondary market prices it accordingly. The 16202ST Jumbo lists around $37,900 in the US and changes hands north of $85,000. The 41mm 15510ST lists near $30,000 and trades above $45,000. The discontinued 15202ST now sits entirely in closed-production territory, priced by whoever wants it most that week.
More than half the value of a steel Royal Oak is the multiple over retail, and that multiple is sentiment with a two-year waitlist attached. It has held for long enough to look structural. It is not. AP has shown it will chase a younger audience when it wants to, which is roughly what the $400 Swatch collaboration was about — different watch, same instinct about who the brand wants in the room. If that audience moves on, nothing about the 16202ST’s $37,900 list price supports $85,000.
I’d still rather own a Royal Oak than most things on this page. I would not borrow to buy one.
The Datejust is the honest benchmark
Nobody pitches the Datejust 41 as an asset, which is exactly why it’s the useful control. The 126334 lists at about $11,650 and carries a market value near $14,289 as of April 2026, a premium of 22.7% over retail. It rose 11.9% over the preceding year and 27.3% across five.
Five years, 27%. Call it 5% a year, before you pay anyone. It’s a real result for a watch you can wear to anything, and it is also the number that should anchor your expectations for every steel sports Rolex people describe as an investment. The Submariner’s ceiling is not far above it. If you’re still choosing your first serious watch, the sports versus dress question matters more to whether you’ll wear it than any of this does.
The costs nobody quotes you
Every price in this article is a market price, meaning what a buyer pays. You sell at the other end of the spread. A dealer buying your Submariner is not paying $13,000 for it, and an auction house takes its cut from both sides. On a watch appreciating 5% a year, the round trip can eat three or four years of gains before you count anything else.
Then there’s keeping the asset in condition. A modern automatic wants a service every seven to ten years, and you insure it if you actually wear it. Paperwork matters more than either: a full set adds 10% to 15% at resale, which is another way of saying that losing the box costs you four figures. None of it pays a dividend while you wait.
What I’d do with the money
If you want an asset, buy a discontinued reference that ordinary people recognise, and then hold it long enough for the supply to thin. That is the only mechanism on this page that has worked repeatedly, and the Rolex Pepsi is the current live example of it. Buy before the discontinuation if you can, which mostly means buying watches you’d wear anyway and paying attention to what a brand is about to retire.
If you want a watch, buy the Submariner or the Datejust at whatever the market asks, wear it, and stop running the numbers. Both hold value well enough that the wearing is close to free. That is the actual case for luxury watches in 2026, and it’s a better one than the spreadsheet.
What I would not do is buy a $140,000 Nautilus or an $85,000 Royal Oak as a position. Those prices already contain the whole story, told by everyone, for five years.
Featured image: Regarn Hope / Unsplash. Inline photos: Submariner and Royal Oak by OpaleHorse, Nautilus by Patek Philippe SA, all CC BY-SA 4.0.
