Launceston test centre: 46.3% pass rate, £426 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Launceston conducted 3,991 car practical tests and issued 1,849 passes. The resulting 46.3% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 249th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 18th of 21 in South West.

That is 3.7 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 5.4 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 46.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.16 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Launceston pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.16 times, or £134. Add 1.16 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 £292. The test cycle at Launceston is therefore about £426. Testing here therefore costs about £50 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.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Launceston was 7 weeks in July 2026, 4.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.16 expected retakes add only around 8.1 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 1,531 standard slots inside the booking window here and 48.4% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 746 passes from 1,586 first tests at Launceston, 47.0% against 46.3% for all attempts. 28 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.77% of them.

The pass rate at Launceston has held flat since 2021/22, moving from 46.0% to 46.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,581 to 3,991 tests a year. A stable rate is the useful kind for planning, because it means this year's figure is a fair guide to next year's odds.

Male candidates passed at 43.8% and female candidates at 50.0%, a gap of 6.1 points across 2,370 and 1,621 tests. Automatic tests made up 15.0% of the workload and passed at 34.8%, 11.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 38.0% in March 2026 to 56.0% in August 2025, a 18.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Dorchester runs 22.6 points higher at 69.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £222 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.