The Most Expensive Watches Ever Sold at Auction

On This Page

• The four records
• The $121,000 that decided the wristwatch record
• The results
• The one clean resale
• Watches that have never sold
• Two contested watches
• The currency error everyone inherited
• What I make of it
• Top Takeaways to Success
• Frequently Asked Questions

Four watches hold four records, and the one everybody quotes is the least comparable of them.

The four records

Any format: CHF 31,000,000. The Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime 6300A-010, a unique steel piece, at Christie’s Geneva on 9 November 2019.

It sold at Only Watch, a charity auction that raises money for Duchenne muscular dystrophy research, and Only Watch charges no buyer’s premium. The hammer was the total. Every other figure on this page includes a commission of 20 percent or more, so ranking that CHF 31 million against them compares a bare bid to prices with the house’s cut inside.

Commercial auction: CHF 23,237,000. The Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication, Sotheby’s Geneva, 11 November 2014, hammer CHF 20,600,000, about $23,983,000 at the time.

It is a pocket watch. So the highest price ever paid at a normal auction for a timepiece was not paid for something anyone wore on a wrist, which is a distinction almost no list makes.

Wristwatch at commercial auction: $17,752,500. Paul Newman’s own Rolex Daytona reference 6239, Phillips New York, 26 October 2017, hammer $15,500,000.

Pocket watch: the Graves again.

The $121,000 that decided the wristwatch record

In November 2025 Phillips Geneva sold the first stainless steel Patek Philippe 1518 ever made for CHF 14,190,000.

At the exchange rate of the day that is roughly $17,631,075. Paul Newman’s Daytona made $17,752,500 in 2017.

The gap is about $121,000, on figures north of seventeen million. In Swiss francs the Daytona also wins, because $17.75m in October 2017 was around CHF 17.4m.

Watch how carefully Phillips worded its own announcement. Not the most expensive wristwatch. Not the most expensive watch. The most expensive vintage Patek Philippe wristwatch ever sold at auction. Three qualifiers, because the outright record was not theirs to claim.

Most coverage dropped the qualifiers.

The results

Prices as sold. Currency matters here more than in any other category on this site.

#	Watch	Provenance	Price	Sale
1	Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime 6300A-010	unique steel	CHF 31,000,000	Christie’s Geneva, 9 Nov 2019, charity
2	Patek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication	pocket watch	CHF 23,237,000	Sotheby’s Geneva, 11 Nov 2014, lot 345
3	Rolex Daytona 6239	Paul Newman’s own	$17,752,500	Phillips New York, 26 Oct 2017, lot 8
4	Patek Philippe 1518 in stainless steel	the first made	CHF 14,190,000	Phillips Geneva, 8 Nov 2025, lot 23
5	F.P. Journe Résonance Souscription No. 007	early client	$13,922,000	Phillips New York, Jun 2026, lot 10
6	Patek Philippe 1518 in steel, same watch as no. 4		CHF 11,002,000	Phillips Geneva, 12 Nov 2016, lot 38
7	F.P. Journe FFC Prototype	Coppola collaboration	$10,775,000	Phillips New York, 6 Dec 2025
8	Patek Philippe 2499 first series, pink gold	British hallmarks	HK$80,370,000	Phillips Hong Kong, 30 May 2026
9	Patek Philippe 2523 South America worldtime	one of two known	CHF 7,961,000	Phillips Geneva, 9 May 2026, lot 27
10	Patek Philippe 1518 pink gold	Prince Toussou	$9,570,000	Sotheby’s New York, 9 Dec 2021
11	Patek Philippe 2523 Gobbi Milan	double-signed	HK$70,175,000	Christie’s Hong Kong, 23 Nov 2019
12	Audemars Piguet Grosse Pièce	pocket watch	$7,736,000	Sotheby’s New York, 8 Dec 2025
13	Patek Philippe 5016A-010	Only Watch 2015	$7,259,000	Phillips Geneva, 7 Nov 2015, charity
14	Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711/1A-018 Tiffany		$6,503,500	Phillips New York, 11 Dec 2021, charity
15	Patek Philippe 5208T-010 in titanium	Only Watch 2017	$6,226,000	Christie’s Geneva, 11 Nov 2017, charity
16	Rolex Daytona 6265 white gold, the Unicorn	John Goldberger	CHF 5,937,500	Phillips Geneva, 12 May 2018, charity
17	Rolex Daytona 6263 Big Red	Paul Newman’s	$5,475,000	Phillips New York, 12 Dec 2020, lot 38
18	Patek Philippe 5004G-020	Eric Clapton	$5,202,000	Phillips New York, Jun 2026
19	Philippe Dufour Grande et Petite Sonnerie No. 1		$5,210,000	Phillips Geneva, 5 Nov 2021, lot 14
20	Rolex 6062 Bao Dai	Emperor Bảo Đại	$5,060,000	Phillips Geneva, 13 May 2017

Five of the top sixteen are charity lots. They are marked, because ranking a charity bid against a commercial one is the single most common error in this category.

The one clean resale

Rows four and six are the same watch.

The first stainless steel Patek Philippe 1518 ever made sold at Phillips Geneva in November 2016 for CHF 11,002,000, and at Phillips Geneva again in November 2025 for CHF 14,190,000.

Up CHF 3,188,000, or 29 percent, over nine years, in the same currency at the same auction house.

The owner’s actual return was smaller than that. Both figures are prices realised, so the 2016 buyer paid a premium on top of the hammer and the 2025 seller paid commission on the way out. Nine years of holding a watch in a safe, insured, for a gross gain of 29 percent before costs, at a time when the headline story about watch collecting was that values were exploding.

The Graves Supercomplication tells a similar story over longer: $11,002,500 at Sotheby’s New York in 1999, $23,983,000 in 2014. Sotheby’s described it as more than doubling its own record.

Watches that have never sold

Three figures appear on nearly every list of the most expensive watches and none of them is a sale.

The Graff Hallucination at $55 million and the Jacob and Co Billionaire at $18 million are asking prices set by the makers. The Breguet Marie-Antoinette, valued around $30 million, is a museum piece.

Publishing an asking price beside auction results is the same error the Beanie Baby market made at a smaller scale. A price nobody has paid is a marketing claim.

Two contested watches

Both of these sit in the table above and both carry an unresolved question, so they should be read with it attached.

An Omega Speedmaster 2915-1 made $3,418,000 at Phillips Geneva in November 2021 and was cited as the Omega record. Its authenticity was subsequently disputed and Omega brought charges in 2023. The matter is not resolved publicly.

The Rolex Daytona Unicorn at CHF 5,937,500 has been the subject of a detailed published case, by the researcher Perezcope, arguing it is a composite assembled from parts. That is an allegation, no finding has been made, and the sale result stands.

The currency error everyone inherited

Wikipedia’s list of most expensive watches has a column headed in US dollars and records the Grandmaster Chime as 31.000. That is the Swiss franc figure. The dollar equivalent was about 31.19 million, and the article’s own introduction says so while the table does not.

That table is the seed for most listicles in this category, so a Swiss franc number has been propagating as a dollar number for six years.

The same table also still ranks the steel 1518 at its 2016 price, ten months after the same watch sold for CHF 14,190,000, and carries none of the 2026 results.

What I make of it

Phillips has effectively won this market. Of the twenty results above, eleven were theirs, and their 2026 Geneva sale took CHF 74,846,995 to become the highest-grossing watch auction ever held.

They are also the only house here that publishes properly. Permanent per-lot pages with prices realised, free, no login. Christie’s blocks automated access to its results and Sotheby’s puts prices behind a login, which means figures from both usually reach the public through a press release rather than a record.

That has a consequence worth naming. When one auction house is simultaneously the biggest seller in a category and the most transparent source of its price data, the public record of what watches are worth is largely written by the firm with the strongest interest in those values rising. Nothing improper follows from that. It is simply worth knowing whose numbers you are reading.

For more record prices, see the most expensive things ever sold.