I have had quartz, automatic, and hand-wind watches.

The hand-wind watches were in my youth and I, not the watch, were the source of the problem.

Quartz was fine when it was digital (Casio, etc) in form for accuracy.  It varied when I went to a traditional (? terminology?) analog format.  Some watches were fast, others slow.

Automatic watches were a real mixed bag when it came to accuracy.  I have a Swiss movement automatic that is reasonably accurate, but it is a special occasion watch.  My everyday watch is a Bertucci and it is quartz.  I have a pair of them currently, and I suspect they have different movements in them.  One is better than the other when it comes to accuracy.

Realism check, please:

What do you accept for gain/lose time when it comes to your watch in a week (or other time period)?

The best watch for keeping Time I ever owned was a quartz Tag Professional it kept perfect time. Maybe had to set it every other month when changing Date (31st to the 1st). The Auto I have had each needed to be regulated by a jeweler. My present is a Swiss and it is +4 seconds a week. Most have run +/-3min a month.

Even a cheap quartz will keep time within seconds per month.  A very good quality mechanical will loose seconds per day.  

Hand wound vs automatic will not make a difference, the quality of the movement will.

Not necessarily. My Rolex perpetual loses less time in a month than my Casio digital watch.

I have a Grand Seiko quartz that is 1 second off a year.

My CWC SBS with ETA 955.112 quartz is about -4 seconds per year.

My Casio Pathfinder PAW-2000 is -0- per year because it haz the atomics.

I find this very surprising.

It's a variable.

Simple facts:

1) COSC standards (Contrôle officiel suisse des Chronomètres) are -4/+6 seconds per day, so a mechanical chronometer can lose up to 4 seconds a day, or gain up to 6 seconds a day and still earn the certification.

The thing is, mechanical watches tend to show variation in time gain/loss simply from the watch's orientation due to the fact that mechanical designs are subject to variation simply from how gravity affects the movement. As such, anyone who's owned mechanical Chronometers is generally aware that you can test yours in the different orientations (face/bezel up, face/bezel down, crown up, crown down) to see how it affects things. Some positions increase or decrease time gain or loss.

Once you've determined this, if your watch gains ~3 seconds per day, you can take it off at night and leave it on the nightstand in the position that results in slight time loss to compensate it closer to 0 daily loss or gain.

The movements also have a regulator screw that can be turned (when the case is opened to expose the movement) towards + or - (i.e., take it to a watch shop and say, it's losing ~7 seconds a day. They turn it a bit towards the + to get it back in COSC range).

For folks like me who have the watch on their wrist 24/7, it's possible that your average daily movements sync up very closely to the current regulation setting, and it is indeed possible for some lucky folks to see something like only a few seconds deviation per month, or even per year, even as day to day deviation varies hased on activity (+2 seconds one day in the month, -2 seconds when compared to the atomic clock on a different week, but overall, the variances mostly cancel out), but it's uncommon.

The variability though, is one reason why the deviation is generally limited (or can be compensated for, as detailed above).

2) Quartz movements are far more precise and constant. That can be good, or bad, as most don't have adjustable regulation, which means if you're lucky, and yours only gains 1 second a day, it will be 30 seconds fast after 30 days. If it loses 4 seconds a day, it'll be 2 minutes slow after 30 days. Any time gain or loss is constant. There's no variance.

3) You want consistency, daily accurate to fractions of a second? Get an atomic syncing quartz. When I first started wearing one, I checked it daily against time.gov. Always ticking right along, to the second. Then I'd check it weekly. Then monthly, then once every few months. Just checked again it for the first time in years. Yup. Still ticking along, right down to the very second.

I have had a large variety of watches over the decades.

From mechanicals that will be off as little as about two minutes in a month, to some that would be off 15 minutes in a month.

I can live with being five or ten minutes in a month.

I don’t know what I could possibly be doing non stop continuously over a full day or even a day and a half that would matter if I was of30 seconds over that whole time.

The Atomic TimeKeeping
Series from Citizen

To my knowledge is the most accurate out there

https://www.citizenwatch.com/us/en/collection/mens-atomic-timekeeping/


But I wear automatics.
They are going to be a little off. And I am ok with that.

Notice that mechanical watch companies advertise about the quality and pride of ownership, but never tell you what the standard of accuracy is.
That's because they can't.

Mechanicals vary due to wear of the movement, movement of oil away from where it needs to be, and lubricants that evaporate or dry our.
A major factor is WHO's wearing it.  People move differently and that affects the accuracy.
A mechanical can be adjusted to a close standard but it can't maintain it over a period of time.

A quartz watch does have a standard.  
In a high accuracy movement it's usually on the order of 1/5 a second per day.
My older Seiko Kinetic was rated at within 18 seconds a month.
Those are maximums.

Most all will hold much closer in actual use, but again, it depends on who's wearing it.
As example, my Seiko is within 1/2 second per month, checked with the US Naval Observatory Atomic clock in Boulder Co.
A close second is the web site.........

https://time.gov/



Most watchmakers are into the fine mechanical movement crowd, a few of us want to know exactly what time it is.
If you want to know the actual time, buy a quartz watch.  
No mechanical can come even close over a period of use where the movement varies.
I look at this like one crowd likes their finely made engraved Pennsylvania flint long rifles, and I like my Colt M4.

Sub is +/- 2.9 sec a day over 3 months then I quit tracking.

All quartz better be on the money.

9F?