Watches built to last,
and what they cost to keep

Every guide in this category claims hands-on testing of dozens of watches. We don’t make that claim, because it wouldn’t be true.

What we do instead is read the manuals, compile the published specifications, and do the arithmetic — including the one number nobody else publishes: what the watch costs to keep running for twenty years. Seiko charges $176 to overhaul a 4R36 and recommends doing it every three years. Over two decades that is more than most of these watches cost to buy. It is also completely absent from every competing guide we read.

Every figure on this site is cited to a document you can open. Where we don’t know something, the page says so in those words.