16 Greatest Automated Watches for Males 2026, In keeping with GQ Watch Nerds
A budding “watch guy” most likely starts off their collection with an assortment of quartz tickers (and let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that). But as your interest in watches grows, it’s only natural for you to want something on your wrist you can brag about, which inevitably pushes you towards automatic watches.
Inside the case of an automatic watch is a weighted rotor that spins as you move your arm, a few little flicks of your wrist throughout the day keeps the internal mechanisms running long enough to keep that minute hand tick-tick-ticking across the dial.
But automatic watches also have a reputation for being finicky or costly. And while that can be true, the beauty of watches is the wide price scale in which the industry operates. From stunners for less than $250 to ones you’d have to mortgage your house (and maybe your parents’ house) to buy, here are the top automatic watches on the market today for any budget.
The Best Automatic Watches Under $250
While not impossible to find a great watch at the $250-mark, you are going to be limited. Given the many internal pieces and complicated mechanisms needed to build an automatic watch, many brands have to charge a bit more for a quality automatic. Even so, brands like Orient and Seiko lead the way on well-made (and well-designed) options.
The Best Automatic Watches Under $500
At $500, the doorway starts to open up a bit more – but only a creak. The usual suspects like Timex and Casio, are populating this price point, Bulova and Sternglas are great alternatives who will give you a little more street cred among collectors.
The Best Automatic Watches Under $1,000
A thousand bucks is a perfectly reasonable budget to have when you want to upgrade your watch game without completely breaking the bank. Here, I’d recommend looking at smaller, or more indie brands to find some interesting designs not seen by more household names.
The Best Automatic Watches for Absolute Ballers
Needless to say, if money isn’t an issue, the sky’s the limit. Not all watches are created equal and buying just for the name recognition alone doesn’t always make for the best watch for the money. Instead, look for a price point that’s commensurate with the movement, design, and materials used, and you’ll never regret the decision to spend the big bucks.
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)
Source: www.gq.com
