Bodmin test centre: 47.5% pass rate, £409 to get through it.

6,392 candidates took the car practical test at Bodmin during 2025/26 and 3,034 of them passed, a pass rate of 47.5%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 229th of 308 on pass rate, and 15th of 21 inside South West.

That lands within 2.6 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 4.3 points below the 51.7% South West average, which makes Bodmin an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 47.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.11 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bodmin pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.11 times, or £131. Add 1.11 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 £279. The test cycle at Bodmin is therefore about £409. Testing here therefore costs about £33 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 Bodmin was 3.6 weeks in July 2026, 8.3 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.11 expected retakes add only around 4 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 2,042 standard slots inside the booking window here and 29.3% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,829 candidates sat their first test at Bodmin and 1,279 passed, 45.2%, which is 2.3 points below the all-attempts rate. 67 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.37% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bodmin has risen by 8.0 points, from 39.5% to 47.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,523 to 6,392 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £134 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.3% and female candidates at 46.5%, a gap of 1.8 points across 3,384 and 3,008 tests. Automatic tests made up 15.2% of the workload and passed at 41.1%, 6.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 40.9% in June 2025 to 53.8% in December 2025, a 12.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Newton Abbot runs 6.4 points higher at 53.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £78 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.