Vintage Watch Market 2026 vs. 2025: An Overview of Current Developments

The vintage watch market has continued to consolidate its standing. In recent years, the secondary market for luxury watches has developed from a niche into one of the most influential pillars of the entire watch industry. Above all, transparent pricing makes actual demand visible while also providing valuable insights into the desirability of individual models. This article examines how the market has developed compared with the previous year and which trends stand out in particular.

Overall market: higher revenue, but hardly a price boom

In 2025, the global secondary market reached a transaction volume of 16.73 billion US dollars, an increase of 36.4 percent compared with the previous year. Median selling prices, by contrast, rose by only around 2 percent. Growth is therefore based primarily on a higher number of transactions and greater liquidity, not on sharply rising prices.

This development is being driven particularly by professional dealers, while the auction business is growing only moderately. Extreme increases in value and new auction records remain rare and are increasingly concentrated in the absolute top segment, for example among sought-after Patek Philippe references.

Two developments are particularly interesting: dealer prices now provide a more realistic insight into actual demand than unchanged manufacturer prices. At the same time, quality is becoming more important, while short-term hype is losing significance. This increasingly benefits solid and established models rather than supposedly “average watches.”

Recovery continues in 2026

Vintage and neo-vintage trend broadens

Market remains highly selective