The DVSA publishes pass rates for every test centre in Great Britain, every year. In the year to March 2026, the national car pass rate was 50.0% — but across the 274 centres that conducted at least 500 tests, the local figure ranged from 34.3% in Wolverhampton to 70.8% in Montrose. Most centres sit much closer together than the extremes suggest: 87% of them fall between 40% and 60%, and the median centre passes 51.4% of its candidates.
The 2025–26 numbers
A snapshot from the DVSA's own data — the five highest and five lowest pass rates among centres with at least 500 tests, plus a spread of well-known centres in between:
| Test centre | Tests conducted | Pass rate |
|---|---|---|
| Montrose | 558 | 70.8% |
| Melton Mowbray | 1,984 | 69.7% |
| Barrow in Furness | 1,699 | 69.6% |
| Dorchester | 4,353 | 69.0% |
| Arbroath | 549 | 68.1% |
| Mill Hill (London) | 9,797 | 51.4% |
| St Albans | 7,336 | 50.7% |
| Wood Green (London) | 11,379 | 46.8% |
| Cardiff (Llanishen) | 16,401 | 46.5% |
| Watford | 12,939 | 46.2% |
| Birmingham (Garretts Green) | 22,480 | 44.4% |
| Speke (Liverpool) | 8,159 | 40.5% |
| Chingford (London) | 13,120 | 39.9% |
| Barking (Tanner Street) | 5,063 | 36.3% |
| Wednesbury | 7,508 | 35.0% |
| Wolverhampton | 11,561 | 34.3% |
Source: computed from the DVSA's published table DRT122A ("Car driving test pass rates by gender and month: test centres"), April 2025 to March 2026, total tests. Centres under 500 tests are excluded because small numbers make rates jumpy.
What the gap actually tells you
Look at the pattern rather than the individual names: the top of the table is small towns and rural Scotland; the bottom is dense urban areas — the West Midlands, outer London, Liverpool. That's not a difference in how strictly examiners mark. It's a difference in what the roads throw at you during 40 minutes: an urban test candidate faces more junctions, more lane discipline decisions, more pedestrians and more traffic per mile than a rural one, so there are simply more opportunities for a fault to happen.
Candidate mix matters too. City centres test more people who learned in a hurry, more re-takers chasing short waiting lists, and more candidates driving unfamiliar hire cars. None of that says anything about how you would do there.
Should you travel to an "easy" centre?
Mostly, no — and the reason is in the mechanism above. The high-pass-rate centre isn't lenient; it's surrounded by quieter roads. If you learned on those roads, you'd likely pass there too. If you learned in a city and travel out for the test, you'll be driving roads you don't know — national-limit rural stretches that city learners rarely practise — and you give up your biggest genuine advantage: knowing the local junctions, lanes and quirks around your own centre.
The honest exceptions: if two centres are equally close to you and you'd genuinely practise around either, the numbers can be a tie-breaker. And waiting lists are a real reason to look further afield — a test three months sooner is often worth more than a few percentage points either way.
How to actually use these numbers
- Set expectations, not strategy. If your centre passes 40%, a first-attempt fail is the statistically ordinary outcome — plan (and budget) for the possibility rather than treating it as a catastrophe. Around half of all attempts nationally end in a fail.
- Train for your centre's roads. A low local rate usually means demanding roads — which are also the roads you'll drive every day after passing. Practise on them deliberately; frequency and feedback beat centre-shopping.
- Work on what actually fails people. The faults that end tests are remarkably consistent everywhere — the DVSA publishes the same top ten year after year, led by junction observation and mirror checks. Those are trainable.
- Ignore year-to-year wobble. A centre moving a couple of points between years is noise, not news.