On January 28, 2026 gold hit an intraday record at $5,590 an ounce. It closed below $4,000 on June 24 for the first time since November 2025, and has since risen, quoted at $4,491.80 on August 19, about 20% off its January high.
Rolex opened the year with an increase on January 1, an average of 7% across the US catalog. Patek Philippe cut US prices in February. Cartier raised in May. On June 1 Rolex went again, about 5% worldwide and on gold models only, leaving steel and platinum untouched, three weeks before that close. It was the second year running Rolex raised twice.
Photo: Rolex
Precious metal watches have always been an asset as much as an object, a way of buying into a market. This year, however, tariffs, currency fluctuation, global instability, and a whole host of other variables have provided myriad excuses for retail watch prices to soar. Collectors across markets are feeling the fatigue of getting less value for their dollar. The same pressure reached the metal itself. Gold jewelry demand fell 17% year over year in the second quarter, to 278 tonnes, its lowest quarterly volume since the pandemic, according to the World Gold Council, an organization for the global gold industry that works to boost and sustain the demand for gold and study how gold affects the world economy. The Council prices its demand data off the LBMA benchmark, which is set at auction twice a day rather than quoted continuously; it averaged $4,506.29 an ounce in the second quarter, 8% under the record it set in the first.
"The historically very high gold prices that have persisted throughout 2026 have led to significantly lower volumes of gold jewelry consumption," said Louise Street, senior markets analyst at World Gold Council. "Luxury, high-end jewelry consumers tend to be somewhat insulated from such price moves relative to the mass market, but demand has been affected across the board — at least when we consider gold jewelry in volume terms."
The United States put a 39% tariff on Swiss watches on August 7, 2025. Cartier, Omega and Patek Philippe raised US prices in response, while Rolex and Audemars Piguet held. Patek went up about 15% the following month, on September 15, taking a 40mm white gold Cubitus, ref. 7128/1G-001, from $80,346 to $92,469. The rate fell to 15% under a deal announced November 14 and formalized December 10. Patek was the one that came back down with it, cutting roughly 8.6% across the US range on February 1. The Cubitus fell to $84,522, still above where it started, and the steel Aquanaut ref. 5968A-001 fell by about the same proportion, from $67,574 to $61,766. UK prices went up 4%. The effective US rate is now 12.5%, in force since July 24.
Photo: Patek Philippe
Perceived value is a huge part of the marketing machine. "We have to remember that luxury watches are the ultimate Veblen goods," said Eugene Tutunikov, CEO of SwissWatchExpo, the Atlanta-based pre-owned watch retailer, adding, "their appeal actually increases with their price. Walking back an MSRP because raw gold dipped would severely damage a brand's equity, and signal weakness to the market."
Rolex also raised prices twice in 2025, on January 1 and again on May 1, but that second increase came after a 10% tariff and applied across the catalog, with authorized dealer margins cut from 34% to 33% at the same time. The June increase followed gold, and touched only the metal. Cartier's increase came on May 21. The next day Richemont reported results for the year that ended March 31 and told shareholders its jewelry maisons had raised prices as they faced higher gold costs. Gold was $4,504 that morning, about a fifth below where it had been in January.
Buyers did not stop spending. "When we look at the value of spending on gold jewelry, it shows a rising trend, indicating that shoppers are happy to spend more on their gold jewelry," said Street. Over the first half, the value of that demand rose 22% year over year to $86 billion even as the volume fell.
Secondary market prices have not followed the metal down. Using Rolex as the barometer, the WatchCharts Rolex Day-Date Market Index, a collection that is all precious metals and all on bracelets, stood at $48,263 in its June 29 reading, a 10.8% year-over-year increase. The primarily steel WatchCharts Rolex Datejust Market Index stood at $10,665 on August 10, up 9.6%. Rolex isn't always the best benchmark for the industry as a whole, but this comparison is a solid indicator. (Crown & Caliber is owned by European Watch Company, a secondary-market dealer that buys and sells the watches covered here, including gold Rolex models.)
Photo: Cartier
Photo: Cartier
"The math hasn't changed; brands will simply hold these new price floors and wait for inflation to catch up to them, allowing their margins to widen in the interim," said Tutunikov, adding, "looking ahead, the trajectory for retail pricing isn't a reversal, but rather a deceleration. Over the last few years, brands aggressively raised MSRPs to close the arbitrage gap between retail and the secondary market. Now that the secondary market has normalized, the pressure to hike prices has cooled, and brands have successfully elevated their entire price architecture. Going forward, expect to see modest, inflation-pegged adjustments rather than the sweeping double-digit hikes we saw during gold's historic run."
Swiss exports of precious metal watches fell 6.5% in value in the first half of 2026, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. Bimetallic models rose 20% over the same period and leapt 42.1% in June alone, a rise the Federation attributed to the price of gold rapidly pushing up the unit price of those watches.
