Rolex Country Codes

Country code or customer code?

Every Rolex leaves the factory with a code on its warranty card. For years it was called the country code, and that's still what most people search for. Strictly speaking, though, it's a code for Rolex's customer, meaning the distributor or importer that took the watch. In many countries that comes down to the same thing as the country. In Germany, for example, Rolex in Cologne is the only distributor, so there's just one code, 100. Austria and Switzerland have several codes because they have several Rolex customers.

The code has been on the warranty card since the mid-1980s. The current US warranty card doesn't have it. It tells you which sales channel the watch was meant for after it was built in Switzerland.

Why you might want to know the code

As far as anyone knows, watches with different customer codes don't differ in any way, and they probably don't. Some collectors still care about a particular code. The code also shows whether the watch was meant for first sale in the EU or in a country outside the EU. If you buy a watch that was first sold in a non-EU country and later resell it in the EU, used or on the gray market, you could run into trouble at a customs check on vacation.

The list of customer codes

Rolex has never published a list. Collectors put this one together. We laid several tables over each other, including Hannes' (Oysterworld) and Percy's (uhrwald.de), and added our own data. Each table knows more or fewer codes, and the list here is what came out of comparing them. Where sources disagree, both options are shown with the note (uncertain). Codes with an asterisk (*) stand for Rolex itself and are issued when private customers buy directly. They're very rare.