Luxury Watches Are About to Get Cheaper in India — Here's Why

If you have been waiting to buy a luxury watch in India, the maths just started moving in your favour. A trade agreement between India and the EFTA bloc — crucially including Switzerland, where nearly every grail is made — is phasing out the import duty that has long made a Swiss watch markedly more expensive to buy in India than abroad. The direction of travel is now fixed: down, every year, until the duty is gone.

Be precise about what this is, though, because the headline oversells it. This is not an overnight discount, and it does not touch every rupee of the price. It is a glide-path — a duty that steps down a little each year on a published schedule — and it sits on top of taxes and brand pricing that are not going anywhere. What it does is dismantle, slowly and predictably, the single biggest structural reason a Rolex has cost more in Mumbai than in Dubai or Geneva.

The Deal — and Why Switzerland Is the Point

The agreement doing the work is the India–EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA), which came into force on 1 October 2025. EFTA is not the European Union — it is a separate four-country bloc of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and, decisively for watches, Switzerland. That distinction is the whole story: an India–EU deal could never lower the duty on a Rolex, because Switzerland is not in the EU. This one can, and does, because it is aimed squarely at Swiss goods — and almost every watch a serious Indian buyer actually wants is Swiss.

Under TEPA, India's 22% customs duty on Swiss watches falls to 0%, in annual instalments, reaching zero around 2031. The first cuts have already landed: from 22% at signing, the rate has stepped down to roughly 15–16% in 2026, and it will keep falling each year on schedule. Nothing about this is speculative — it is a signed treaty with a published timetable.

Corroboration — the US Just Ran the Same Experiment

If you want proof that a duty change moves this market rather than merely annoying accountants, look at what just happened in the United States. In August 2025 the US briefly imposed a punishing 39% tariff on Swiss imports; Swiss watch exports to America fell by roughly half in the months that followed. In November 2025 the two countries reached a framework to cut that tariff to 15%, formalised in December — and the market immediately began to normalise.

India's glide-path is the same mechanism, running slower and in the buyer's favour: less duty, over time, and the demand follows. We are not theorising about how buyers respond to a lower duty — we just watched a larger version of it play out in the world's most important watch market.

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What It Actually Means for What You Pay

Here is the honest part. Customs duty is only one layer of an Indian luxury-watch price, and the falling duty narrows the gap without erasing it. India still applies GST on top; the brands themselves have been raising global prices, which quietly offsets some of the duty relief; and for the most coveted names, the deeper problem is not price at all but availability — Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille are not officially retailed in India, so no tariff change puts them on a domestic shelf.

So read it as a trend, not a coupon: each passing year, the built-in penalty for buying your Swiss watch inside India shrinks. That is genuinely good news — it makes the domestic market more competitive with Dubai, Singapore and Europe over time. But for a purchase you are making today, the decision still comes down to the same question it always has: where you source it.