Rolex Is Coming for the Grey Market's Watches

Rolex's shortages built the grey market. Now Rolex wants a cut, and it's taking the watches to get one.

For most of the last decade, the grey market ran on a simple deal. Rolex made fewer steel sports watches than people wanted, and a few thousand independent dealers made a very good living on the gap.

That deal is ending, and the first half of 2026 shows who's ending it. A year ago, the unworn trade, the grey market's most profitable business, sold $444 million worth of Rolex. Rolex's own Certified Pre-Owned program sold $191 million. Today CPO sits at $385 million and unworn has slipped to $335 million.

The easy read is that Rolex is poaching the grey dealer's customers, and it is. The bigger prize is their inventory, and that should change how you shop for your next Rolex.

The Crossover

In twelve months, Rolex CPO went from less than half the size of the unworn trade to bigger than it. CPO sales rose 101%. More telling, the number of watches it sold rose 85%, so most of that growth came from selling more watches rather than charging more for the same ones.

Unworn went the other way, down 25%. CPO now accounts for about 9% of Rolex secondary sales, just ahead of unworn at about 8%.

Over the same period, the Rolex secondary market grew 43.5% to $4.3 billion, and CPO grew more than twice as fast. Unworn lost a quarter of its sales in a market that expanded by almost half. That's what losing share to a competitor looks like.

Unworn was the grey dealer's money maker: the watch you couldn't get at the boutique, sold at a markup so you could skip the waitlist. Losing ground there hurts. Still, the more revealing numbers are about which watches Rolex is selling.

Whose Watches Are These?

On the grey market's best-selling references, Rolex CPO now takes roughly one dollar in five.

The ten references CPO sells most are the Submariner 116610LN and the Hulk, the GMT-Master II 116710LN and the Batman, both dials of the ceramic Daytona 116500LN, the no-date Submariner 114060, and older Daytonas in steel, gold and platinum. None of them is in the current catalog. All are previous-generation references, the same stock grey dealers have lived on for years.

The growth on those references is steep. CPO unit sales of the 116610LN rose 127%, the black-dial Daytona 137% and the platinum Daytona 222%.

Now set those against total secondary sales for the same watches. The 116610LN did about $31 million, and $6.4 million of it went through CPO. The 116710LN did $28 million, with $5.4 million through CPO. The Hulk did $40 million, with about $6 million through CPO.

That 9% headline badly undersells what's happening. On exactly the watches grey dealers depend on most, Rolex already takes 15 to 20% of the money.

Grey dealers have these same watches, usually for less. So why would anyone pay Rolex's price?

The Price of Certainty

I once walked into a Rolex boutique thinking CPO might be where I'd find a reasonable price. I walked out with sticker shock. CPO costs more than grey, sometimes a lot more, and it doubled anyway.

Morgan Stanley used WatchCharts data to compare CPO prices with grey prices on identical references. The 1916 Company charges about 16% over grey. Watches of Switzerland runs about 35% over in the US and 41% in the UK. Bucherer sits at 42%. Find a Submariner at a grey dealer for $12,000, and the same reference costs about $14,000 at the 1916 Company and around $17,000 at Bucherer. That's five grand for what is, physically, the same watch.

People pay it, and fast. On the top CPO Submariners and GMTs, 66 to 71% of listed watches actually sell. On the white-dial Daytona it's 83%. Across Rolex as a whole, it's about half.

The prices made me flinch. The sell-through numbers made me wonder what, exactly, people are paying for.

The old grey premium was a fee for skipping the line. I waited eight months for the call on my Oyster Perpetual, and I understand why people paid to avoid that. CPO charges a premium too, but it's selling something else.

Earlier this year I covered how fakes changed this market, and they've gotten scary good. Every grey purchase now comes with a question most buyers can't fully answer on their own. Is it real, and is everything inside it original?

The EveryWatch report doesn't measure this, so take it as my read. CPO sells certainty with Rolex's name on it, and no grey dealer can fully match that. In a market this good at counterfeiting, plenty of buyers think that's worth 16 to 42%.

Rolex's Own Store

The biggest seller of Certified Pre-Owned Rolex in the world is owned by Rolex.

Bucherer leads all CPO retailers at $52 million. Watches of Switzerland is second at $43 million and the 1916 Company third at $40 million. Rolex announced it was buying Bucherer in 2023. So the priciest CPO markup in the Morgan Stanley data, that 42%, belongs to Rolex's own shop.

For years, Rolex's own shortages created the grey market. Watches you couldn't buy at retail became profit for whoever could get their hands on them. Now Rolex earns money in its own resale market, through a retailer it owns, selling the same references those dealers depend on.

I don't blame Rolex. If someone was getting rich off the scarcity of your product, you'd want a piece of it too. It's smart business, and it hands Rolex control of the one part of its market it didn't already run.

The Squeeze Is on Supply

The grey market will survive this. CPO and unworn together make up only about 17% of Rolex secondary sales. The other 83% is regular pre-owned, mostly through grey dealers, in a market that just grew 43.5%.

The problem many of them haven't priced in is supply. Every CPO watch starts life as a trade-in or a watch someone sold back to an authorized retailer. Each one that goes into CPO is a watch that never reaches a grey dealer's case, and CPO volume rose 85% in a year.

A dealer who loses customers can cut prices and win them back. A dealer who can't source watches has nothing to discount.

The pressure lands on two specific businesses: flipping unworn watches, and buying up trade-ins on the popular sports references. Rolex now competes head to head in both.

How to Buy a Rolex Now

The next time you shop for a Rolex, the decision comes down to one number. Find a CPO price and a grey price for the same reference in similar condition. The gap between them is what you're paying for trust. Decide whether it's worth it to you.

I think it usually is when a mistake would really hurt. That means your first Rolex, a reference that gets faked or modified a lot, or a gold or platinum Daytona, where one bad buy costs tens of thousands. It also means any watch where you couldn't spot a problem yourself. Grey usually wins when you know how to inspect a watch or you have a dealer you really trust.

Don't assume every CPO price is the same, either. As I argued in "Rolex CPO Is a Trap," Rolex runs the program but each dealer sets its own prices. The cheapest CPO dealer charges about 16% over grey and the priciest charge more than 40%. Selling speed tells the same story:

The report blames the slow sellers on prices set too high. You get the same certificate and the same program at very different prices. Shop CPO dealers against each other, not only against grey.

For now, this works in your favor. Grey dealers have to compete with Rolex on trust, and CPO dealers have to compete with grey on price, so markups get squeezed from both sides. Don't expect that to last if Rolex keeps taking more of the resale market.

The Bill Comes Later

The EveryWatch report calls Rolex CPO the model the rest of the industry should follow. I'm less enthusiastic. The upside is real, since you get a watch Rolex itself has checked and you know what's inside it. But the more of the resale market Rolex controls, the more say it has over what a used Rolex costs, and my bet is that means higher prices.

Going into the second half of the year, I'm watching two things. First, whether CPO keeps growing this fast while unworn keeps shrinking. Second, whether the slow CPO dealers finally cut their prices. If they don't, they'll be sitting on a lot of watches.

Rolex spent decades deciding who gets to buy a new Rolex. Now it's starting to decide who gets to sell a used one.

Have you bought CPO, or would you still go grey? If you're a dealer, I especially want your side of this. Tell me in the comments.

Sources

• EveryWatch, Rolex secondary market report, H1 2026
• Morgan Stanley analysis of CPO vs grey pricing, using WatchCharts data