What Is Actually Happening in the Australian Luxury Watch Market

The short answer: Australia is a small, steady market for luxury watches rather than a booming one. Swiss watch exports to Australia reached CHF 424.9 million in 2025, up 3.5%, while global Swiss watch exports fell 1.7%. No figure for the size of the Australian market itself traces back to a primary source, and export data says nothing about what a pre-owned watch resells for here.

This page used to carry a lot of precise-sounding numbers: a market size, growth rates, brand shares, demographic splits, city splits. None of them could be traced to a source, so all of them have been removed rather than replaced. What follows is what can be verified, what genuinely cannot be, and what we see ourselves across the watches people bring us.

How big is the Australian luxury watch market?

Nobody publishes an answer that traces back to a primary source. That is worth saying plainly, because most of the pages we have read on this question print a number anyway.

The one Australia-specific watch figure that does come from a primary source is published by the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, which reports the declared export value of Swiss watchmaking exports to each market. Australia appears as its own named line item.

Period	Value (CHF million)	Change on the same period a year earlier	Australia's world rank
January to December 2025	424.9	up 3.5%	13th
January to July 2026	237.9	up 3.1%	13th
July 2026 (single month)	35.8	up 14.6%	14th

Source: Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, Swiss watch exports in 2025, published 29 January 2026, and the monthly market statistics published in August 2026. The figures are the declared export value of Swiss watchmaking exports to Australia, of which finished watches accounted for 24.4 of the 25.6 billion francs exported worldwide in 2025. They are not Australian retail sales and not resale values. The July 2026 figure is a single month, monthly figures are volatile, and one month is not a trend.

Set against the world total, that is a more interesting result than any inflated figure would be. Global Swiss watch exports were CHF 25,552.4 million in 2025, down 1.7%, which the Federation recorded as the second annual decline in a row. Australia grew while the world market shrank. Australia is also small: 1.7% of global Swiss watch export value in 2025, with Oceania as a whole at 1.8%, against Asia at 45.7%, Europe at 30.9% and America at 21.0%. The world figure has since turned. Across January to July 2026 global exports were up 0.9%, and Australia, up 3.1% over the same seven months, is still a little ahead of it.

Then comes the caveat the Federation prints at the top of its releases: "All the figures released by FH refer to exports data and not to sales to end-consumers. Differences between these two types of data may therefore exist."

That one sentence is why no honest writer can state an Australian market size. Export value counts new watches leaving Switzerland, priced as the exporting firm declared them. It does not count what Australians actually bought, and it has nothing whatsoever to say about the pre-owned market, which is where every watch we buy comes from. We could find no Australian Bureau of Statistics series that measures the luxury watch market, and there is no series anywhere for pre-owned watches. Commercial market-research firms do sell Australian estimates, but the method sits behind the paywall while the number travels for free, so we will not quote one and we would treat any page that does with caution.

What do we actually see when Australians bring us watches?

We have bought more than 1,000 watches. This is our own testimony rather than a statistic, so it is written that way: patterns, not percentages. It is also the only part of this page nobody else can write.

• Steel professional models are the quickest conversations. In our experience a well-known steel sports reference in honest condition is straightforward to value and quick to resell. A precious metal dress watch from the same maker can sit for months before it finds its buyer, and any offer has to reflect that wait.
• The gap between what an owner expects and what the market pays is widest on dress watches. It is also wide on watches bought overseas, where the price paid at retail in another currency stops being a useful reference the moment the watch lands here.
• Over-polishing is the most common self-inflicted loss of value we see. People tidy a watch up before bringing it in, expecting it to present better. Sharp original case lines cannot be put back once they are gone. If you are tempted, read our guide to watch condition grading first. Our advice is nearly always to leave it alone.
• Box and papers change the conversation without deciding it. A complete set makes a watch easier to resell and that shows up in the offer. A watch without them is still perfectly saleable, and authentication establishes whether a watch is genuine either way.
• More people arrive already holding an overseas asking price than did a few years ago, and are surprised that the Australian number differs from it.
• Gold watches are the ones we see misjudged most often, in both directions. Some owners assume the metal weight is the value, which badly undersells a gold Rolex or Cartier. Others assume gold automatically means more, when demand for that specific reference matters far more than the case material.
• People often decide they would rather borrow than sell once they learn that borrowing against a watch is an option at all.

Are watch prices going up or down at the moment?

In our own dealing, secondary prices rose sharply after 2020, came off that peak, and have since moved reference by reference rather than as a single market. That is an observation from what people bring us rather than a measurement, and we are not going to attach a percentage to it.

The reason is straightforward. There is no free, methodologically transparent secondary market index we could cite. The well-known ones are proprietary commercial products, and the weighting of what goes into them is not published alongside the number, which means a figure lifted from one is a figure you cannot check. A number you cannot check is worth nothing to you, no matter who prints it.

What can be shown is that the market genuinely does move in different directions at once. In the Federation's export data, watches with an export price above CHF 3,000 fell 1.9% in value across 2025, then rose 12.0% in July 2026, while the CHF 500 to CHF 3,000 band fell 3.9% in that same month. Those are new watches leaving Switzerland rather than used watches selling here, so they are not resale values. They do demonstrate that "the watch market" is not one thing, which is the point.

Why is the top of the watch market so much larger than it used to be?

This is the real structural change of the past 25 years, and unlike most claims made about watches it is documented in a primary source.

Swiss watch exports, global	2000	2025
Watches exported (millions of units)	29.7	14.6
Export value of watches (CHF billion)	9.28	24.41
Share of value from watches over CHF 3,000	34.0%	80.1%
Share of units from watches over CHF 3,000	1.6%	12.8%

Source: Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, Exports of Swiss watches by price categories, historical series since 2000, published August 2026. These figures are global rather than Australian, and they count watches rather than total watchmaking exports, which is why the value here is lower than the CHF 25,552.4 million quoted above. The two share rows are worked out from the Federation's published unit and value figures rather than published by it as stated statistics.

Roughly half as many watches, worth well over twice as much. The Federation put the 2025 fall in volume at 4.8%, which it described as 740,000 fewer watches than the previous year. The brands we buy sit at the top of that price band, and that concentration is the practical reason a deep pre-owned market exists for those names at all. It is why a specialist can price a Rolex, Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet reference from recent comparable sales rather than from guesswork.

Why did Swiss watches get more expensive while demand was falling?

Because a large part of the increase came from inputs rather than from demand. The Federation's own explanation for 2025: "the price of gold and the Swiss franc reached record highs, significantly increasing the cost of Swiss watches, especially on foreign markets."

That is relevant to Australian owners of gold and bimetallic watches, though not in the direct way people hope. In the 2025 export figures, precious metal watches were close to flat by value, down 0.3%, steel fell 2.8% and bimetallic rose 2.4%. In July 2026 the same categories read very differently: bimetallic up 23.8%, steel up 9.0% and precious metal up 3.7%. Rising costs on new watches can influence what a pre-owned equivalent is measured against, but that is an influence, not a formula, and it does not convert into a higher offer on any particular watch. A gold watch is still valued as a watch, not as gold.

Do overseas watch prices apply to a sale in Australia?

Not directly, and this is the most common source of disappointment we encounter. Three things sit between the two markets.

1. An overseas listing is an asking price, not a sale price. The two routinely differ, and only one of them is evidence of anything.
2. Exchange rates, GST and import costs. A price quoted in another currency has to survive the trip before it means anything here.
3. Australian demand is its own thing. A reference that trades briskly in Europe or Asia can be slow here, and occasionally the reverse is true.

If you intend to use an overseas figure as a negotiating position, read who buys watches in Australia first, so you can tell the difference between a buyer who explains their number and one who simply states it.

What does any of this mean if you are thinking about selling a watch?

Honestly, less than you would like. This page cannot tell you what your watch is worth, and neither can any other page. Any site claiming to tell you the state of "the market" is selling you something, and that includes us: we buy watches in order to resell them, we make our margin on the resale, and we are therefore not a neutral narrator of prices. That is precisely why we would rather show you sourced figures with their limits stated than a confident market summary you have to take on trust.

What is actually useful is narrower and more boring.

1. Price the reference, not the market. Two watches from the same brand and the same year can sit in completely different markets. The only way to know where yours sits is to have that specific watch looked at.
2. Get more than one valuation. Any legitimate buyer expects it and will not be offended by it.
3. Do not polish or service it in preparation. Both cost money and neither reliably returns it.
4. Do not try to time the market. Waiting for "the market" to improve assumes a single market that moves as one. The data above says it does not.
5. Consider borrowing rather than selling. If you need funds but expect to want the watch back, a loan against your watch leaves ownership with you and returns the watch when the loan is repaid. We lend as a licensed pawnbroker, from a minimum advance of $15,000 over terms of 3 to 12 months, with a $400 setup fee, interest of 4% to 10% per month depending on the assessment, and a maximum APR of 131%.

Buy Your Watch has bought luxury watches across Australia, is a licensed second-hand dealer and pawnbroker, licence number SHD-0017882, ABN 85 670 502 315, and rates 4.9 from 64 Google reviews. Every watch is authenticated in person by a certified watchmaker before payment is released, and payment is made by Osko or PayID, with a typical turnaround of 24 to 48 hours from submission to payment. Start with a free valuation, or compare every route first in our guide to where to sell a watch in Australia.