Date Your Seiko Watch By Serial Number

Let's Date Your Seiko Watch

Have you ever wondered what year your Seiko watch was manufactured? Often knowing the date of a watch is important to understand its history and provenance, or perhaps you want to know if a watch is a birth year watch, or maybe you’re just curious? In any case, lets date your Seiko watch using the EmmyWatch Seiko Serial Number Lookup.

In order to date your Seiko watch accurately, you will need a few pieces of information from your watch. This information can be found on the watch caseback (flip your watch over and look at the back).

Seiko watches can generally be dated to a month and a year. Seiko serial numbers only include a single digit for the year of manufacture (2 for 1972, 5 for 1985, etc), and thus it is only possible to date a Seiko watch to a decade with the serial number alone. In order to more accurately date a Seiko watch we can also use the movement number because movements were generally only manufactured in a specific decade. For this reason our Seiko Serial Number Lookup uses both the Seiko serial number and the Seiko movement number when dating a Seiko watch.

So how do you find these numbers? Proceed to the next section to learn how to find these numbers.

How to Find Numbers

When using our Seiko Serial Number Lookup, you will need both the Serial serial number and the Seiko movement number to date your watch accurately. These numbers can be found on the caseback of your Seiko watch.

The Seiko serial number is a 6 or 7 digit number with no dashes. You can find this number printed on your Seiko case back. See the picture of a Seiko serial number below (162637). Write down your Seiko serial number.

The Seiko movement number is a 4 digit sequence which is comprised of numbers and sometimes letters. The Seiko movement number can be found as part of the Seiko model number. The Seiko model number is made up of two parts, the Seiko movement number and the Seiko case number separated by a dash. You can find the Seiko model number printed on your Seiko case back. See the picture of a Seiko model number (5646-7010). In the case of the Seiko model number 5646-7010, the movement number is 5646 and the case number is 7010. Write down your Seiko movement number.

Once you have found your Seiko serial number and your Seiko movement number, use our Seiko Serial Number Lookup to accurately date your Seiko watch manufacture date.

Interpret The Results

Our Seiko Serial Number Lookup will provide you with a manufacture month and a manufacture year. Our lookup tool tries its best to give you a specific year but sometimes that is not possible and it will provide you with a few options. For the example Seiko shown above with serial number 162637 and movement number 5646, here is what our Seiko Serial Number Lookup gives:

Ah Ha! So the Seiko example watch was manufactured in June 1971. For this example our lookup tool was able to give a specific year. As mentioned earlier, sometimes multiple years will be given if it is not possible to date more accurately, often these years are decades apart so it is possible to infer the year by the style of your watch (does the watch look 1960s or 1970s, for example).