A New World for Pre-Owned? Our Take on Rolex 2025 Price Increases

We knew it was coming, the question was how much.

The 2025 price updates Rolex announced made some substantial changes to prices of precious metal and two-tone pieces, but steel has remained mostly unchanged. 

Stainless steel Submariner models all rose about 1%, while the rose, white, and yellow gold models saw increases of 9-11.5% depending on metal. These changes push the precious metal pieces into completely new price-points. It’s a nontrivial change to target pricing. 

The Cosmograph Daytona models were the starkest category for Rolex. Once more, the steel model is up about 2-3% but the gold models rose by over 18%. These increases have pushed Rolex precious metal watches into a high horology price point for even some of their more basic watches. The industry as a whole has not experienced the same precious metal price surges we see in the Rolex collections.

The Sea-Dweller and Deep Sea models remained virtually unchanged in price, with fluctuations within 1% for the steel and titanium models. Similarly, the Explorer models in steel were impacted perhaps by 100 to 150 dollars at most, while the two tone variant went up about 1000 dollars, marking a 9% increase. 

By this point, you likely see the theme across the collections— and the phenomenon remains the same across the remainder of the offerings: minimal increases in stainless steel pricing and substantial changes to precious metal variants. 

t’s useful to discuss the strategy behind these changes. Rolex is further separating the spread between the three metal classes of its pieces: stainless, two tone, and full precious metal. Any number of factors contribute to this. On the most basic level, the price of gold has risen sharply in the last 2 years (an estimated 27%), and particularly through 2024. That said, this hardly explains the magnitude of the increases. More fundamentally, Rolex is further price discriminating against the customer that wants precious metal variants of watches. The demand for precious metal pieces is significantly less elastic, and the move to separate stainless from precious metal was a deliberate, carefully calculated strategy by Rolex. 

Perhaps equally interesting as the changes in retail pricing for the new year are the projections regarding how these adjustments will impact the secondary market. According to WatchCharts CEO Charles Tian, “Over the past few years, we’ve already seen many Rolex models begin to trade below retail, while almost all of them traded above retail at the peak of the market in 2022. If Rolex continues to raise retail prices (as they have almost every year this decade) and secondary prices continue to gradually fall, we could see a significant number of former retail buyers opting for pre-owned instead.” 

This gets at the core of what could be the Rolex pricing strategy. If Rolex observes a substantial discrepancy between retail and preowned pricing, it can reasonably increase retail prices to remain in touch with perceived value. However, as a consequence, as retail prices continue to rise, we may see the value proposition of pre-owned Rolex grow alongside it. The differences between retail and preowned trading values will narrow and the market will near a healthier equilibrium.

To this effect, Tian uses a white gold GMT Master as a perfect case study: “five years ago the retail price was $38,250 against a market price of around $40,000. Today, the watch has a retail price of $45,200 and a market price of under $36,000. Inflation adjusted, the retail price has remained almost unchanged over the past five years, while the secondary market price has fallen by more than 25%.” 

Keep in mind, there’s precedent for this. In 2022, Rolex kept precious metal and two-tone models relatively stable, but tacked on a substantial price increase on the steel models. This coincided with a surge in demand for the stainless steel sports models in the same time frame. 2023 instead saw a sharp increase in two-tone and precious metal pieces, with stable steel watch prices (some models receiving a small adjustment). The 2024 price list showed a relatively balanced increase distributed across the full collection (roughly 4% according to Monochrome Watches). 

So what can collectors expect for the coming year? It all depends on what you’re on the market for, but expect to pay substantially more for those more luxurious configurations of popular models in precious metal if you can get allocated them. And keep your eyes on the secondary market for an ever-growing value proposition in the new market.