Plymouth test centre: 40.7% pass rate, £519 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Plymouth conducted 11,167 car practical tests and issued 4,546 passes. The resulting 40.7% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 292nd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 20th of 21 in South West.

That is 9.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 11.0 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 40.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.46 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Plymouth pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.46 times, or £152. Add 1.46 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 £367. The test cycle at Plymouth is therefore about £519. Testing here therefore costs about £143 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 Plymouth was 7 weeks in July 2026, 4.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.46 expected retakes add only around 10.2 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 4,343 standard slots inside the booking window here and 36.6% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 4,589 candidates sat their first test at Plymouth and 1,781 passed, 38.8%, which is 1.9 points below the all-attempts rate. 75 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.63% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Plymouth has risen by 1.3 points, from 39.4% to 40.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,671 to 11,167 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £26 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 38.3% and female candidates at 43.7%, a gap of 5.5 points across 6,194 and 4,973 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.9% of the workload and passed at 34.5%, 6.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 35.6% in April 2025 to 47.6% in July 2025, a 12.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Poole runs 12.7 points higher at 53.4%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £183 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.