Servicing your luxury watch is a great way to keep it in tip-top shape for years and years to come. Getting your luxury watch serviced can save you the headache and money of trying to fix a watch yourself, trust me I’ve tried it before. However, many people wonder how often they should visit a watch specialist to get high-quality servicing.
As a general rule, automatic luxury watches should be serviced every four to seven years, while quartz watches should be serviced every eight to ten years with a battery change every year or two. Quartz watches have a larger time interval because they have fewer moving parts compared to automatic watches.
Throughout the rest of the post, I will be going over why servicing a luxury watch is so important, and I will also go more in-depth on how often you should service a quartz or automatic luxury watch.
| Luxury Watch Servicing | Quartz Luxury Watch | Automatic Luxury Watch |
| How Often For Servicing? | 8-10 Years | 4-7 Years |
| Battery Replacement? | 1-2 Years | N/A |
Why Is Servicing A Luxury Watch So Important?
Servicing a luxury watch keeps can keep it healthy and last a lifetime. After you wear a luxury watch for a couple of years, you may notice that the watch movement itself can become more and more inaccurate or it may just completely stop working. And in addition to that, wearing a luxury watch often over a couple of years can cause dirt and scratch accumulation that can negatively impact the longevity and overall look of the watch.
Servicing a luxury watch by a trained professional can help you fix the movement of your luxury watch and clean up all the dirt build-up to keep it in the best shape possible. While getting a luxury watch serviced is often overlooked, it is a vital action to take to make your luxury watch last for years.
Whether you are a trained watch specialist and do it yourself or you bring your watch to your nearest professional, going the extra mile to service your watch and keep it looking brand new is a fantastic way to stretch its life span.
How Often Should You Get An Automatic Luxury Watch Serviced?
An automatic luxury watch should be serviced every four to seven years. Compared to other luxury watches, automatic luxury watches need to be serviced more often because of how much craftsmanship is put behind them along with the abundance of internal moving parts they have.
The inside of an automatic luxury watch is comprised of several moving parts and gears that make up the rotating weight of how an automatic watch works, which means that you have to consistently get it serviced for a nice smooth rotation.
For example, a couple of years ago, I was wearing my white Panerai Luminor watch, which is the first automatic luxury watch that I absolutely love, and it just randomly stopped working on me. I constantly tried to wind it with its crown and tapped it on my wrist to try to make that watch move again, but it did not work for me at all.
That’s when I decided to go see a watch specialist near me in a store at my local mall called “Gold Creations”. I told one of their watch specialists basically everything that happened with my watch, and he agreed that it was time to get my watch serviced. I trusted the man servicing my luxury watch, and when I finally got it back from the store, it looked and worked just as good as new.
After I got my luxury watch serviced, I asked the guy that serviced my watch at Gold Creations, “How often should I come back to service my watch?” He replied to me,
“You should try to come back every five years or so to get this watch serviced.”
After he told me this, I try to get my Panerai watch serviced about every 5 years or so, which is a relatively large time interval because I usually don’t wear it every day: after I got it serviced that one time, I put a reminder in my iPhone calendar 5 years later to get it serviced again.
This just goes to show how important watch servicing is for the longevity of your luxury watch. If I didn’t get it serviced after I noticed my watch was not working properly, it probably would’ve reduced the lifespan of my watch because its internal parts would keep deteriorating.
How Often Should You Get A Quartz Luxury Watch Serviced?
A quartz luxury watch should be serviced every eight to ten years. Quartz watches are generally known to be more durable than automatic watches and have fewer overall internal parts, which allows for a larger servicing time interval.
While automatic watches have plenty of internal moving parts and gears to create a rotor, quartz watches use a battery to power the movement of the watch hands, which explains why there are so many fewer internal moving parts in a quartz watch.
However, since the primary internal part of a quartz watch is a battery, you do need to get a battery change every year or two. Using a quartz luxury watch often over the course of a year drains the battery powering the watch, so you have to get the watch battery replaced consistently.
The most common battery that goes into a quartz luxury watch is a silver oxide battery. These are the batteries that many luxury watch companies use to power their quartz watches, which makes them easier and cheaper to replace.
However, you could also get a lithium watch battery replaced into your luxury watch, which lasts substantially longer than a silver oxide battery: lithium-ion batteries in a watch can be five years and up. On the flip side, it is on average more expensive to replace a watch battery with a lithium battery because of the larger battery life.
The Key Take-Away
Automatic luxury watches should be serviced every four to seven years, while quartz luxury watches should be serviced every eight to ten years with a battery change every year or two. Going out of the way to service your luxury watch every once and a while is an optimal way to keep it in the best shape for years and years to come.