Bristol (Kingswood) test centre: 51.9% pass rate, £353 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Bristol (Kingswood) conducted 14,863 car practical tests and issued 7,719 passes. The resulting 51.9% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 153rd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 10th of 21 in South West.

That lands within 1.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.2 points above the 51.7% South West average, which makes Bristol (Kingswood) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.93 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bristol (Kingswood) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.93 times, or £119. Add 0.93 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South West rate of £36 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £233. The test cycle at Bristol (Kingswood) is therefore about £353. Testing here therefore saves about £23 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Bristol (Kingswood) was 5.3 weeks in July 2026, 6.6 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.93 expected retakes add only around 4.9 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 4,777 standard slots inside the booking window here and 18.0% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 7,629 first attempts at Bristol (Kingswood), 4,072 passed, a rate of 53.4%, which is 1.4 points above the all-attempts figure. 297 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.89% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bristol (Kingswood) has fallen by 2.2 points, from 54.2% to 51.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 10,683 to 14,863 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £25 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Bristol (Kingswood), 51.8% against 52.1%. Automatic tests made up 20.9% of the workload and passed at 43.8%, 8.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.9% in February 2026 to 56.1% in December 2025, a 7.2-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South West runs more than five points ahead of Bristol (Kingswood) on pass rate, so travelling elsewhere is unlikely to pay for itself once you add an unfamiliar route, the travel and the settling-in lessons. The cheaper lever here is preparation on the roads your instructor already knows.