How Much the South West Coast Path Costs: Camping to B&B

The South West Coast Path is a public National Trail, so the walk itself is free. What you pay for is everything around it — beds, food, getting to the start and home from the end, the ferries on the south coast, and the optional extras that make the walking easier. This guide sorts those into the four ways people actually walk the path, gives the published figures where a public price page exists, and is honest about where it can only say "more" or "less".

One caution before the numbers. Prices on this coast are set by the beach holiday, not by walkers. The accommodation page puts it plainly: in late July and August rooms are scarce and expensive along the whole path, and minimum stays that do not suit someone moving on each morning are common. Every band below is cheaper and easier in May, June, September and October.

What is free and what is not

Free: the path, the waymarking, the views, the stage pages and the app with offline maps, and the water taps the app marks on the route. Not free: every bed, every ferry crossing, the bus or train at each end, and — unless you carry it — moving your bag.

The ferries are worth a line of their own. Seventeen crossings sit on 15 of the 52 stages, and each boat is a fare. They are small, but on a south-coast section like Plymouth to Exmouth, with seven crossings in eight days, they add up, and several boats are on-demand rather than timetabled. The ferries page lists which stages carry them.

The four bands

Camping — the cheapest, with a catch

Campsites are the cheapest bed on the path, and the South West is holiday-park country, so there are plenty of them, particularly in Cornwall and Dorset. The catch is in the camping guide: there is no general right to wild camp in England and the National Trail advice for this path is to seek the landowner's permission, so the free option is not something to plan a walk around. Campsites are also seasonal, and in August they fill with families rather than walkers, so book rather than turn up.

The other cost of camping is weight. A full pack turns a hard stage into a very hard one — Hartland Quay to Bude carries 856 m of ascent, Lynmouth to Combe Martin 908 m — and the days a camper saves money on are the days the camper most feels the load. Food is cheap when you carry it: the water and resupply guide lists the shops the stage data marks along the route, and the towns are never more than a day or two apart.

Hostels — the published floor

YHA publishes its starting prices: a bed in a shared room from £15 a night and private rooms from £39, with the note that prices vary by hostel and season and that these are the starting rates. Membership is £20 a year by direct debit (£25 for a single year) and takes 10% off bookings, which pays for itself in a week if you use YHA more than a handful of nights.

The limit is supply. The accommodation page describes hostels as thin on this trail — YHA Treyarnon Bay near Padstow, Cohort in St Ives and the Portland Bird Observatory in the old lower lighthouse are the ones it names — so a hostel-only walk works on a few sections and not on the rest. Treat hostels as the cheap nights inside a B&B walk rather than a plan on their own.

B&Bs and inns — the normal way, priced by the month

Most people walk this path from guesthouses, pubs with rooms and B&Bs, because the route passes through resort towns and fishing villages for its whole length and is the best-supplied trail in England. There is no single published figure to give you here, and any number would be wrong within a month of writing it, because the same room costs very different amounts in June and August. What the site can say from its own accommodation records is where the pressure is: the resort towns have plenty of beds; the long cliff sections between them — north Cornwall, north Devon, the day round the Lizard — can have a single option, and a single option in August sets its own price. Book those nights first, then fit the towns around them.

Two things reduce the bill without reducing the walk. Walk in the shoulder months, which the accommodation page says transforms both price and availability. And base yourself in one town for several nights and use the bus back to the path each morning, which is how most people walk the path in sections anyway — the itineraries guide lists the sections with a station or bus at each end.

Packaged and guided — paying for the booking

A packaged walk buys the beds booked in the right places, the bag moved each day, and a phone number when a ferry is not running. The value is highest exactly where the booking is hardest: the north Devon cliffs, the Lizard, any section in a busy month. Prices depend entirely on the operator, the dates and the standard of bed, so the only useful advice is to get quotes for the same section, the same dates and the same bed standard and compare them. The guided tours page lists operators working on the path.

Baggage transfer — the figure that changes the walk

This is the extra most walkers ask about, and it is one with a published price. Luggage Transfers, which covers the South West Coast Path among its routes, quotes from £23 per day, with a 20 kg allowance per item and an operating season of 1 March to 31 October. Bags must be ready by 9 am; the delivery target is 4.30 pm, or 5 pm in peak season, and you can cancel until 7 pm the day before for a refund less an admin fee.

On a six-day section that is a floor of around £140 for one bag; on the classic Padstow to St Ives week, closer to £160. Two people sharing one 20 kg bag halve it. What it buys is a day pack on stages where the climbing decides everything, and for a first trip the beginners' guide treats it as one of the three things that make the path easier than the numbers suggest. Note the season: outside March to October you carry your own.

Books, maps and the app

The guidebooks are cheap next to a night's bed and last for years. Trailblazer's three-part series is £12.99 for Exmoor and North Devon and £13.99 each for Cornwall and for Dorset and South Devon. Cicerone's three map booklets, covering the path on 1:25,000 OS mapping, are £12.95 each. Paper OS Explorer sheets cost more per sheet and the National Trails list runs to 17 of them, so most people carry the booklets or a phone. The maps and GPX guide sets out the options; the app and the per-stage GPX files on this site are free.

Transport at each end

Both ends of the path can be reached from London by a combination of train and bus, and the National Trail team points walkers to National Rail and Traveline for the journey planning. Minehead has no National Rail station, so the start is a train to Taunton and the bus; the finish at South Haven Point is the Sandbanks chain ferry and a bus to Bournemouth station. Neither is expensive relative to a week's beds, but the railheads along the way — Barnstaple, Newquay, St Ives, Penzance, Falmouth, Plymouth, Exmouth, Weymouth — are what make walking in sections cheap, because you can start and finish where the train is. The getting-there guide covers each one.

Putting it together

For a one-week section, the order of cost is the same in every band: the bed is the biggest line, the month is the biggest multiplier, transport is a fixed amount at each end, and baggage transfer is the one optional figure you can price exactly in advance. A camper carrying food and walking in June spends a fraction of what a B&B walker spends in August on the same coast — and, on the cliff stages, works a good deal harder for it.

Decide the month first, because it moves every other number. Then choose the band. Then book the scarce nights — the ends of the section and any night on a stretch with a single option — before anything else.