U.S. Tariffs on Swiss Watches: The 39% Levy Reshaping American Collecting (2025)
The border etched into every balance wheel: How import duties have transformed watch ownership into an unwitting act of economic allegiance
In August 2025, the United States imposed a 39 percent tariff on Swiss watch imports, targeting an industry that represented CHF 4.4 billion in annual exports to America. The levy—among the highest ever imposed on a Western ally—has triggered price increases across major brands: Patek Philippe raised U.S. prices by 15 percent, Cartier by 10 percent, Breitling by 4.3 percent. Swiss exports to the U.S. surged 45 percent in July as brands rushed shipments ahead of the deadline, then plummeted 24 percent in August. For American collectors, the consequences are just beginning to surface.
Key Tariff Impacts at a Glance
Tariff rate: 39% on Swiss watch imports
Effective date: August 2025
Price increases: Patek Philippe (+15%), Cartier (+10%), Swatch Group (+6-10%), Breitling (+4.3%)
Export impact: +45% surge (July), -24% drop (August)
U.S. market size: CHF 4.4 billion annually (16.8% of Swiss exports)
In the hushed corridors of an American watch salon in Manhattan, a collector lifts a Patek Philippe Nautilus from its glass vault, flips it over, stares at its stamped movement, and asks: “How much extra just so I can own this in my time zone?” That moment—between the mechanical hum of balance wheels and the cold arithmetic of import duties—captures how the 39 percent U.S. tariff on Swiss watches has quietly converted the act of collecting into forced citizenship in trade policy. The watch, once purely symbol and heirloom, becomes a ledger entry in a government ledger. The collector did not ask for this duty; nevertheless, by buying, servicing, insuring—even merely coveting—a Swiss timepiece on American soil, they have become complicit in a taxation regime born of macroeconomic grievance.
The U.S. Market: Switzerland’s Largest Export Target
It was in early August 2025, as the new tariff schedule took effect, that Swiss watch exports to the U.S. spiked: a 45 percent surge in July shipments bore the mark of last-minute reflexes by brands and retailers rushing to beat the 39 percent levy. In April, a similar panic had driven a 149 percent jump—though observers warned that absent that flurry, exports would have fallen 6 percent. Those anomalies are the signatures of a market scrambling to adjust not to demand but to duty. As the tariff settles in, August’s export drop of 24 percent to the U.S. underscores the inverted logic: scarcity fashioned not by desirability, but by prohibitive import cost.
The U.S. is no peripheral market for Swiss watchmakers—before the tariff, it accounted for 16.8 percent of exports, CHF 4.4 billion in value. The levy, framed as a “reciprocal” penalty to correct America’s trade deficit with Switzerland, rates among the highest ever imposed on a Western ally. In effect, Switzerland’s flagship luxury export sector is being pressed into the role of scapegoat for structural trade politics—its elegance weaponized as a punch-bag.
Brand Responses: Price Increases from Patek Philippe to Breitling
For the collector, the consequences are opaque but real. Retail markups are rising; numerous brands have already signaled U.S. price increases in response to tariffs, Swiss franc strength, and rising gold costs. Some observers predict that the effective burden could render luxury Swiss pieces in the U.S. on average 65 percent more expensive. Authorized dealers, often working with thin margins, may absorb part of the cost—but that too is limited. Worse, brands may choose to raise global prices slightly so that buyers in Europe or Asia partially foot the U.S. tariff burden. In effect, a U.S. buyer becomes a financial backstop for a policy he or she did not design.
Breitling’s response makes this transfer of burden explicit. CEO Georges Kern, one of the few to speak bluntly on the subject, admitted that the brand had pre-shipped large volumes into the U.S. before the levy but could not postpone the inevitable. On October 15, Breitling will raise prices in America by an average of 4.3 percent—a modest climb compared with Swatch Group’s 6–10 percent, Cartier’s 10 percent, and the 15 percent levied by Patek Philippe. Kern has outlined three levers available to any brand: improving efficiency, trimming margins (including those of retailers), or lifting prices both at home and abroad to spread the cost. It is a taxonomy that reduces politics to arithmetic, reminding collectors that no matter which lever is pulled, the outcome eventually lands on their wrists.
Creative Solutions: From Corporate Restructuring to Satirical Watches
Other brands are finding different levers to pull. Christopher Ward has restructured its corporate operations, routing U.S. imports through local entities and consolidating shipments to soften the tariff’s impact by nearly a third. Swatch Group, less concerned with softening the blow than mocking it, released a limited-edition watch titled “WHAT IF...TARIFFS?”, its inverted 3 and 9 digits a sardonic nod to the 39 percent levy. And Yema, the French house with a loyal niche following, has abandoned its Swiss-assembled line altogether. In a letter to its American customers, the brand explained that tariffs made Biel/Bienne production untenable, and that its future lay in proudly reclaiming French assembly with Sellita calibers, framed as a return to its “Manufacture Française” roots. The industry’s responses range from surgical to symbolic, but all converge on the same outcome: collectors inherit the consequences.
The Politics of Collecting: When Ownership Becomes Allegiance
And yet, the real transformation is not in the balance sheets of brands but in the private rituals of those who buy their watches. Collectors often imagine themselves as apolitical, transcendent in their worship of mechanics, aesthetics, and provenance. Yet a tariff war breaches that fantasy. The act of collecting has always had soft politics—choices of maker, country, even materials—but now it is hardwired into national economies. Every acquisition is a small vote of allegiance (or surrender) to a regime of borders and taxes. A watch bought for personal fulfillment becomes a line item in macroeconomic retribution.
History offers a parallel: in the quartz crisis of the 1970s and ‘80s, Swiss mechanical watchmakers were nearly toppled by cheap electronic imports, and many closed or consolidated. The difference now is that the enemy is not a disruptive technology but the tax code. And instead of being passive victims, collectors are newly enlisted—unwilling, and often unknowing—in the political economy of tariff warfare.
Switzerland’s Diplomatic Response and Market Uncertainty
Predictably, Switzerland has initiated diplomatic maneuvers. Swiss officials are among the 15 nations selected for “privileged” tariff negotiations. The Swiss are even dangling arms and energy deals to persuade Washington. Meanwhile, the Swiss National Bank cited the tariff threat as a factor in pausing further interest-rate hikes. But for collectors, such machinations may seem distant. Their immediate worry is: will the watch they cherish lose liquidity, appeal, or resale value because it is now marked by a top-line 39 percent extra tax?
In the end, the collector does not inhabit a neutral sphere. Even as the collector seeks timelessness, one’s timepieces now carry the timestamp of tariff politics. In lifting a Swiss watch from a tray in New York, one also lifts the weight of international consequence. That delicate object—gears meshing, case polished—is a strangely loyal citizen: registered in the country’s tariff rolling, taxed into life, forced into obedience. In that sense, every American watch collector has become, unwittingly, a fiscal subject of trade policy. In the silence between tick and tock, the tariff echoes—and the collector realizes that ownership is not just personal, but political.