The Most Expensive Watches in the World

≈ $55 million · Jewelled one-off

Laurence Graff's Hallucination is less a watch than a bracelet of coloured diamonds that happens to tell the time — over 110 carats of rare pink, blue, yellow, orange and green stones set in platinum. It was unveiled at Baselworld in 2014 and has never been offered publicly since. Nothing else in horology carries this concentration of gem value on a single wrist.

≈ $40 million · Convertible diamond piece

A white-diamond counterpart to the Hallucination, built around a detachable 38.13-carat pear-shaped centre stone that can be worn as a ring. Around 152 carats in total. The engineering question here is not escapement design but how to make that much stone sit comfortably — Graff's answer remains one of the most technically demanding settings ever completed.

CHF 31 million · Auction record holder

The single most expensive watch ever sold at auction, hammered at Christie's Only Watch charity sale in Geneva in November 2019. A unique steel edition of Patek's most complicated wristwatch: 20 complications, two dials, five chiming modes including a grande and petite sonnerie and a minute repeater. Steel — not gold — made it a collector's holy grail.

≈ $24 million · Pocket watch, 1933

Commissioned by New York banker Henry Graves Jr. to outdo a rival collector, it took Patek Philippe eight years and packs 24 complications, including a celestial chart of the night sky over Graves's Fifth Avenue apartment. Sold at Sotheby's Geneva in 2014 for CHF 23.2 million, it remains the benchmark for pre-computer watchmaking ambition.

≈ $30 million (insured) · Historic grand complication

Ordered in 1783 for the French queen with a brief of no expense spared and every known complication. Abraham-Louis Breguet died before it was finished; his son completed it in 1827 — 34 years after Marie-Antoinette's execution. Stolen from Jerusalem's L. A. Mayer Museum in 1983 and recovered in 2007, it is now effectively priceless and never sold.

$17.75 million · Auction, 2017

Newman's own Daytona, given to him by Joanne Woodward with the engraving 'DRIVE CAREFULLY ME', sold at Phillips New York in 2017. It is the most expensive Rolex ever sold and the moment the collector market accepted that provenance can outweigh complication. The exotic dial it made famous is still the most copied design in vintage watch collecting.

≈ $18 million · Emerald-cut spectacle

Two hundred and sixty emerald-cut diamonds — around 260 carats — invisibly set across the case, bracelet and skeletonised movement, so light passes straight through the watch. Commissioned as a statement piece and worn publicly by Flavio Briatore. Divisive among purists, unmatched as a demonstration of what gem-setting can do at scale.

≈ $25 million · Haute joaillerie

Three heart-shaped centre stones — a 15-carat pink diamond, a 12-carat blue and an 11-carat white — sit on a bed of 163 carats of further diamonds arranged as flower petals that fold open to reveal the dial. Chopard's in-house jewellery atelier spent a reported year on the setting alone. It remains the house's most valuable single creation.