Watch Straps

Everything about buying a strap comes back to one measurement: lug width, the gap between the lugs where the strap sits, in millimeters. It is almost always an even number — 18, 20, 22mm are the common ones — and if you buy the wrong width, the strap simply will not fit. Before anything else, measure the gap with a ruler or check our lug width chart, which lists the width for dozens of popular models. Most of the divers on this site are 22mm; most field watches are 20mm.

After width, the choice is material, and each material is really a use case. Nylon (NATO / single-pass) is the cheap, tough, wash-and-wear option: it floats a watch a little higher, survives water and sweat, comes in endless colors, and the single-pass design keeps the watch on your wrist even if a spring bar fails. Leather dresses a watch up and is the most comfortable once broken in, but it hates water and will eventually need replacing — which is fine at these prices. Rubber and silicone are the summer and dive answer: waterproof, grippy, and the right call for anything you actually swim in. And woven steel mesh is the one that makes a plain watch look like it came from the factory that way — infinitely adjustable, with no punched holes to fall between.

The feature worth paying a couple of dollars for is quick-release spring bars— a tiny lever on the underside of the strap that lets you swap it in seconds with no tools and no scratched lugs. Nearly every strap we recommend has them; it is the difference between changing straps on a whim and changing them never. NATO-style straps are the exception — they thread through under the caseback, so they need no tools by design.

The economics here are the best in watches. One watch and three well-chosen straps costs less than a single mid-tier watch and gives you what feels like three. A leather strap for the office, a NATO for the weekend and a rubber strap for the pool is a genuinely complete rotation. Below, we rank the best of each type; if you only read one guide first, make it how to measure a watch strap.