Watch Insurance Guide exists because the cost of insuring a luxury timepiece in the United States is more variable, and less transparent, than collectors expect. Two enthusiasts living a few hundred miles apart can pay premiums that differ by a factor of two for the same watch — and most never learn this until they actually start shopping for coverage.
The Site was built as a simple, editorial response to that opacity. It is not an affiliate marketplace, not a lead generation funnel, and not an insurer. It is a calculator with an opinionated methodology and a curated comparison of US insurers — published openly, without payment for inclusion.
What the calculator does
The estimator takes three inputs — your state of residence, the brand of your watch, and the declared value — and returns a directional annual premium. It then projects that premium against a list of well-known US watch and jewelry insurers, applying each insurer's published positioning to produce a sample range.
— Formula —
The 1.5% base rate reflects the industry midpoint for comprehensive jewelry policies in the United States. State factors are derived from publicly available property crime and natural disaster data. Brand factors reflect relative theft frequency and parts replacement cost.
The numbers it produces are not quotes. No insurer underwrites a policy from a web calculator. What the model does deliver is a useful range — a sense of whether to expect $80, $300, or $1,500 a year for the piece you have in mind. That alone shortens the shopping process considerably.
How insurers are selected
The seven insurers featured in the calculator results were chosen for editorial relevance. They represent the practical universe a US collector encounters when shopping for watch coverage: Jewelers Mutual for standalone policies under $100,000, Chubb for high-net-worth collections, Hodinkee Insurance for watch-specific coverage underwritten by Chubb, BriteCo for digital-first instant binding, Lavalier for the mid-market, and State Farm and GEICO for scheduled personal articles riders attached to existing homeowners policies.
Inclusion is not for sale. The list is editorial, and we reserve the right to add, remove, or reorder insurers based on market changes, reader feedback, and our own assessment of relevance to the watch-collecting audience.
What we do not do
We do not sell insurance, broker policies, or process claims. We are not licensed insurance agents in any state. We do not collect personal information through the calculator — your inputs stay in your browser and are not transmitted to any server. We do not accept payment from insurers in exchange for inclusion in the comparison, favorable placement, or favorable copy.
What we do is publish the methodology openly, maintain the model as the market evolves, and refine the comparison based on what we learn from reader correspondence.
Editorial standards
Where we make factual claims — about premium ranges, state-level variation, or insurer positioning — we ground them in publicly available data and our own observation of market communications. Where we describe insurer offerings, we work from their published materials at the time of writing. Insurance products change. If you spot something out of date, write to us — corrections are welcome and answered promptly.
Get in touch
Press inquiries, methodology questions, correction requests, and partnership questions all go to the same place — please see our Contact page.