Guide to Replacing a Garmin Watch Charger

Are you looking for a replacement Garmin watch charger?

Whether you’ve misplaced your original charging cable or it’s stopped working, here are a few options you can look at. They are all great choices for a replacement charger for a modern Garmin running watch, although each is unique in one way or the other.

If your Garmin watch is not charging, then something to consider is cleaning your charger and your watch. You can read more cleaning your Garmin watch here.

If you’re not sure which kind of charger your Garmin uses, skip to the end for a list of watches compatible with these chargers. Most modern Garmin running watches use the same charger, but if your model is a few years old theres a slim chance that you need a different kind of charger.

If cleaning hasn’t solved your problem and you know what kind of charger you need … then keep reading for a few great options! And when you pick one, you might as well get a couple extra. They’re cheap, but they’re also small and easy to lose.

You’re better off having an extra one on hand and not needing it. Every time I read a Reddit thread about a runner who is traveling away from home and lost their charger, it reminds me to pack an extra charger in my bag.

My Favorite – The Garmin Puck Charger

Hands down, my favorite Garmin charger is this charging puck. Or maybe you’d call it a charging stand, a charging dock, or something else.

Whatever you call it, it’s great.

What I dislike most about the traditional Garmin charging cable is that it sticks into the back of your Garmin watch. This prevents the watch from laying flat. Instead, it has to lay on its side, and it’s difficult to see the watch face while it’s charging.

With this charging puck, the watch sits flush on top of the charger. The watch face is looking straight up. You can easily see that it is in fact charging without bending the cable around in different directions.

The charging port itself also fits nice and snugly against the back of my Garmin Forerunner.

I had some issues with my Garmin watch not charging properly, which I wrote about in this post here. And this charging puck helped solve the problem. It has my vote for for the best Garmin watch charger.

Traditional Garmin Charging Cable

If you prefer a traditional charging cable for your Garmin, then I’d suggest this Garmin watch charger cable.

The cable itself is pretty sturdy, and the charger snaps snugly into the back of your watch. The OEM cable is only about 18 inches long, and this one measures 3 feet. So you’ve got twice as much length, which can be useful depending on your charging set up.

As long as you don’t abuse the cord too much, it should hold up for a while. I used these before I found the charging pucks, and they did a decent job.

The other nice thing is that they’re dirt cheap. You can get two of these cables on Amazon for a fraction of the price that Garmin charges for one OEM cable. And there was nothing special about the OEM cable that came with my Garmin Forerunner.

90 Degree Garmin Charging Cable

Another good option is this Garmin charging cable with a 90-degree elbow.

It helps eliminate the issue of the cable plugging into the back of the watch. Since there’s a 90 degree elbow in the head of the charging cable, it fits in the back of the watch and the watch can rest on the table, nightstand, desk, or where-ever you happen to charge your watch.

This helps prevent unnecessary bending of the cable – which should ultimately increase its longevity and reduce potential charging issues. And the last thing you want is to be unable to charge your Garmin running watch.

Garmin Watch Charger USB-C Adapter

A final option is this Garmin watch charger USB-C adapter.

Similar to the previous charging cable, it incorporates a 90-degree elbow in the charger to more easily plug into the back of your watch. But the other innovation with this charging adapter is that it works with a USB-C charger.

By this point in life, just about everything else – except some Apple products and your Garmin watches – uses USB-C for charging. It works for my phone (I’ll take my Google Pixel 6 Pro over an iPhone any day) and my laptop. And with this charging adapter, it will more or less work with my Garmin Forerunner as well.

These are great little things to have if you travel a lot, and you want to avoid traveling with an extra charger. At this point, I take along a wireless charging dock, a USB-C cable, and my Garmin charging cable. With this adapter, I could take one less charging cable and free up a little space in my bag. It’s also small and cheap enough that you could just stash some in your work and travel bags – just in case you end up somewhere and you’ve forgotten your main charger.

Do All Garmin Watches Use the Same Charger?

All of the newer Garmin watches do use the same charger. However, Garmin did switch things up a while back.

Older models used a charging clip. This charging clip had four pins in it, but it clipped on to the watch from the side.

The newer models all use the charging cable. This cable still has four pins on it, but it plugs into the watch from the rear. The cable plugs into the watch, rather than clipping around the side and kind of “sitting” on it.

See below for a full list of models that use each charger.

All of Garmin’s most recent watches use the new charging cable. This includes:

• Garmin Forerunner: 245, 245 Music, 255, 255 Music, 255S, 255S Music, 265, 45, 45S, 55, 745, 935, 945, 945 LTE, 955, 955 Solar, 965
• Garmin Fenix: 5, 5 Plus, 5S, 5S Plus, 5X, 5X Plus, 6 Pro, 6 Sapphire, 6 Solar, 6S Pro, 6S Sapphire, 6S Solar, 7 Sapphire Solar, 7 Solar, 7 Standard, 7S Sapphire Solar, 7S Solar, 7S Standard, 7X Sapphire Solar, 7X Solar, 7S Pro, 7 Pro, 7X Pro
• Garmin Epix: Epix (Gen 2), Epix Pro (Gen 2)
• Garmin Enduro: Enduro, Enduro 2
• Garmin Approach: G12, S10, S12, S40, S42, S60, S62, X10
• Garmin Venu: Venu (Original / SQ), Venu 2 (Original, S, SQ, SQ Music, Plus), Venu 3 / 3S
• Garmin Vivoactive: 3, 3 Music, 4, 4S
• Garmin Vivomove: 3, 3S, Luxe, Sport, Style
• Garmin Vivosport

Pretty much all of the Garmin watches that were released before the models listed above used the old charging clip. This includes:

• Garmin Forerunner: 230, 235, 30, 35, 630, 635, 645 Music, 735XT
• Garmin Approach: G10, S20
• Garmin Vivomove HR
• Garmin Vivosmart 3

If you’re looking for a replacement charging clip for one of these watches, here’s a good choice.

If you go back before these watches, there were a few other iterations of the charging clip. Some of the watches had the charging pins placed in a different spot in the back of the watch.

But really, if your watch is that old … you might want to think about upgrading to a more current one. Check out this guide to choosing the best Garmin Forerunner and see what is out on the market today.

At this point, Garmin seems pretty committed to the current charging cable.

It’s unfortunate that you can’t use the same USB-C charging cable for your watch as you can for just about every other device in your house. But it’s not as easy to waterproof those ports, and so we’re probably stuck with some version of the current charging cable.

If you skipped ahead to see this list of compatible Garmin running watches, here’s a link back to the top of this post – and the list of replacement Garmin chargers.

But the short version is that my vote for the best Garmin watch charger is this charging puck.