Cheltenham test centre: 43.2% pass rate, £474 to get through it.

Cheltenham is a mid-sized centre, putting 5,161 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 2,231 passed, so the centre finished the year on 43.2% and 275th of 308 nationally, 19th of 21 within South West.

That is 6.8 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 8.5 points below the 51.7% average for South West. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 43.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.31 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Cheltenham pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.31 times, or £143. Add 1.31 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 £331. The test cycle at Cheltenham is therefore about £474. Testing here therefore costs about £98 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

A fail at Cheltenham costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.5 weeks in July 2026, 1.6 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.31 expected retakes that is about 17.7 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,320 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.9% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,095 passes from 2,550 first tests at Cheltenham, 42.9% against 43.2% for all attempts. 25 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 0.98% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Cheltenham has fallen by 6.9 points, from 50.1% to 43.2%. Volume has been steady, 5,400 tests then against 5,161 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £100 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 44.6% and female candidates at 41.8%, a gap of 2.8 points across 2,612 and 2,548 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.9% of the workload and passed at 35.6%, 7.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 38.0% in November 2025 to 52.0% in May 2025, a 14.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Barnstaple runs 8.2 points higher at 51.4%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £115 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.