Luxury Watch Ownership Cost: Full Guide

A Rolex Submariner Date ref. 126610LN carried an official list price of $9,150 when it launched in September 2020, according to Chrono24’s pricing history. Five years later the same reference trades between $13,000 and $15,400 on the secondary market, per WatchCharts and Chrono24 listings reviewed in 2025–2026. That gap — a watch worth more used than new — is the entire reason “luxury watch ownership cost” is a harder question than it looks. The sticker price is the smallest number in the equation.

Ownership cost is not the purchase price. It is purchase price minus what the watch is worth when you stop owning it, plus everything you spend keeping it insured, serviced, and stored along the way. For most consumer durables that math runs in one direction: down. A handful of luxury watches invert it. The job here is to separate the watches that genuinely offset their carrying costs from the ones marketed as doing so.

The five numbers that define the cost

Strip the marketing away and ownership cost reduces to a short list of inputs. Here are the figures that drive every calculation in this analysis, each tied to the Submariner Date worked example.

Sources: Chrono24 and WatchCharts secondary-market data (2025–2026); authorized Rolex service center pricing (Bob’s Watches, ECI Jewelers, 2025–2026); BriteCo, Jewelers Mutual, Zillion insurance rate disclosures (2025–2026).

Note the deliberate vocabulary. Retail price is what an authorized dealer charges. Secondary market value is what the watch fetches from a private buyer or dealer afterward — the term applies at first mention and throughout, not “resale price.” The distinction matters because for this reference the two diverge by thousands of dollars, and which one you anchor to determines whether you think you’re buying an asset or an expense. For a broader treatment of how those secondary numbers are set, the watch secondary market guide walks through the mechanics.

Building the net cost of ownership

Take a five-year ownership window on the Submariner Date, bought at current retail and sold into the secondary market. The carrying costs accumulate quietly. Insurance at roughly 1.5% of an appraised value near $14,000 runs about $210 per year, or $1,050 over five years. Rolex’s recommended service interval stretches to roughly ten years, so a five-year holder may skip a full overhaul entirely — but a buyer planning to keep the watch a decade should budget $800–$1,200 once at the authorized center. Secure storage is the variable most owners ignore until a claim depends on it.

Sources: Rolex list pricing; Chrono24 and WatchCharts secondary-market ranges (2025–2026); insurance rate disclosures from BriteCo and Jewelers Mutual (2025–2026). Negative net cost indicates the resale value exceeded total outlay over the period.

Read the bottom row carefully. At the high end of the secondary-market range, the watch’s resale more than covered five years of insurance and storage — the owner wore a $10,400 object for half a decade and came out roughly $750 ahead before counting the wrist time. At the low end, the all-in cost of ownership was about $1,650, or $330 a year. Either outcome is extraordinary against any normal durable good. A $10,400 car, boat, or appliance does not return 90%+ of its purchase price after five years of use, let alone exceed it. This is the structural fact that the true cost of a Rolex Submariner over ten years rests on.

The Finluxy Watch Value Retention Score

To compare watches on a single axis, this cluster uses one proprietary metric: the Finluxy Watch Value Retention Score, defined as secondary market value after five years divided by original retail price, times 100. A score of 100 is break-even. Above 100 means the watch appreciated; below means it depreciated.

For the Submariner Date ref. 126610LN, the inputs are a 2020 launch retail of $9,150 and a 2025 secondary-market midpoint of roughly $14,000. The arithmetic: 14,000 ÷ 9,150 × 100.

Calculation: $14,000 ÷ $9,150 × 100 = 153. Retail from Chrono24 launch-price history (2020); secondary-market midpoint from WatchCharts and Chrono24 ranges (2025–2026). A score above 100 indicates appreciation.

A score of 153 places the Submariner Date firmly in appreciation territory — every retail dollar spent in 2020 corresponded to about $1.53 of secondary-market value five years on. That figure is unusually high and worth treating skeptically as a forward-looking signal. It captures a specific 2020–2025 window that included the 2021–2022 watch-market bubble and its partial correction. WatchCharts notes the 126610LN peaked near $18,000 in early 2022 before settling back toward $13,000 by late 2023. The score is a record of what happened, not a forecast. The broader question of whether these patterns hold is the subject of whether luxury watches actually appreciate.

Opportunity cost: the comparison nobody runs

Appreciation looks impressive in isolation. It looks different next to the obvious alternative. The Submariner’s roughly 53% gain over five years works out to a compound annual growth rate near 8.9%. Over the same stretch, the S&P 500 returned an average of 14.4% annually for the period January 2021 through December 2025, according to Fidelity’s calculation of the index’s total return.

So the watch appreciated — and still trailed a low-cost index fund by more than five percentage points a year. A $9,150 investment in the S&P 500 compounding at 14.4% would have grown to roughly $17,900 over five years, versus the watch’s ~$14,000 secondary-market value. The watch holder gave up around $3,900 in foregone market return for the privilege of wearing the asset. That is the honest framing: the Submariner is a remarkably low-cost thing to own, not a market-beating investment. The two are different claims, and most coverage collapses them into one.

What most coverage overlooks

Here is the insight buried in the data: the Submariner’s appreciation and its low ownership cost are the same fact, and that fact has a ceiling. The watch is cheap to own because the secondary market is deep and liquid at this price tier — thousands of verified transactions per year, per WatchCharts — which means an owner can exit near fair value at will. That liquidity is exactly what evaporates as you climb the price ladder. A $200,000 Richard Mille does not have thousands of annual comparable sales; it has a thin, dealer-mediated market where the spread between what you pay and what you can recover widens sharply. The Submariner’s friendly ownership math is a property of being a high-volume, mid-five-figure steel watch — not a property of luxury watches generally. Coverage that extrapolates from the Submariner to the entire category gets this backwards. The question of where that breaks down is precisely the price at which watches stop being investments.

Servicing and the long-hold scenario

The five-year window flatters the Submariner because it skips a service cycle. Extend the hold to ten years and the math shifts. A full overhaul at an authorized Rolex service center runs $800–$1,200 for a standard movement, with the figure climbing past $1,500 if parts or water damage are involved, according to authorized-center pricing reported by Bob’s Watches and ECI Jewelers in 2025–2026. Insurance compounds too — at 1.5% of a rising appraised value, a decade of coverage approaches $2,000–$2,500. Brand matters here: complications such as chronographs and annual calendars cost substantially more to service, which is why a like-for-like view of watch servicing cost by brand belongs in any long-hold budget.

Storage is the line item collectors underprice. A specialist insurer may reduce premiums for watches kept in a certified safe, and a complete set with box and papers directly supports an appraisal at claim time. The cost of getting storage right is modest against the downside of a denied claim, and the trade-offs are laid out in detail in coverage of watch storage and safe costs and fine jewelry insurance costs.

Methodology

The $150k+ household calculus

For a household earning $150k+, a $10,400 steel Submariner is not a portfolio decision — it is a discretionary purchase that happens to carry an unusually low net cost of ownership. The relevant trade-off is not “watch versus index fund,” because the dollars involved are spending money, not investment capital. Framed honestly, the question is whether a wearable object that costs roughly $330 a year to own at the worst end of the range, or returns a small profit at the best, is worth it to you. For most buyers in this bracket the answer turns on use, not appreciation: a watch worn weekly for a decade costs pennies per wearing once resale is netted out.

The discipline worth keeping is the one the data enforces. The favorable math is specific to liquid, mid-five-figure steel references — the moment a purchase climbs into Patek Philippe or Richard Mille territory, the spread widens, liquidity thins, and the carrying costs stop being offset by a deep resale market. A buyer who treats the Submariner’s economics as a template for the whole category will overpay for that lesson. Spend at the tier where the secondary market is deep, insure and store the piece properly so a claim holds, and the watch can be close to free to own. Treat it as an investment expected to outrun equities, and the numbers — an 8.9% CAGR against the index’s 14.4% — quietly disagree.