How we calculate the numbers

Source data

All pass-rate figures on PassRates.uk come from the DVSA quarterly statistical release on gov.uk. Specifically:

• DRT122A: car practical pass rates by gender, month and DTC. Provides per-centre per-month conducted/passed counts split male/female/total.
• DRT122C: car practical first-attempt pass rates and zero-fault rates per centre per year.
• DRT121F: top 10 driving faults nationally (test routes do not have per-centre fault breakdowns published).
• DRT222A and DRT222B: motorcycle Module 1 and Module 2 per-centre data.
• DRT322A and DRT322B: HGV/LGV off-road and on-road per-centre data.

The DVSA release covers 2014-15 to the latest reported year (currently 2024-25). The data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and is the same source cited by major UK newspapers and government reports.

Headline pass rate: most recent DVSA year

Every pass rate shown as a headline number on this site (the figure in the page title, the hero stat tile, the map marker, the rankings) uses the most recent DVSA financial year as the primary period. Currently that is April 2024 to March 2025, published as DRT122A on 14 August 2025. This matches the figure DVSA itself cites in its quarterly press releases, what news outlets quote, and what every comparable UK driving-test comparison site shows. A user who searches “[centre] pass rate” sees the same number across sources.

currentPassRate = (passed in latest year) / (tests in latest year) * 100

Lifetime average (the older methodology, still shown as secondary context on every centre page) pools every recorded year from 2014-15 onwards. It produces a more stable number, but it includes the COVID-era closures and route changes (e.g. the December 2017 manoeuvres reform) that no longer reflect what a learner booking today will face. As a headline figure it disagreed with every external source and confused users; as on-click context it usefully shows whether the current year is an outlier.

Fallback for low-volume centres

A pass rate computed from N tests has a 95% confidence interval of roughly ±1.96 × √(p × (1 − p) / N). At N = 1,000 around the UK average (p ≈ 0.48) the CI sits at ±3.1 percentage points, which is just below the typical 2-4pp gap between adjacent rankings, so the rank order is statistically defensible at that sample. Noise grows fast below it: ±4.4pp at N = 500, ±7pp at N = 200, ±10pp at N = 100. We therefore use a tiered fallback on the current statistical period:

• Latest year alone if the centre ran ≥1,000 tests in that year. The vast majority of mainland centres (Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, all London centres, etc.) are in this bucket. Labelled e.g. “2024-25”.
• 3-year rolling sum if the latest year has fewer than 1,000 tests but the most recent 3 years combined cross 1,000. Labelled e.g. “2022-25 (3yr avg)”. Typical for small market towns and Scottish Borders centres.
• Rolling-3yr low if the 3-year sum is between 500 and 999. Badged “low sample”.
• Lifetime fallback for very low-volume centres (typically Scottish island centres conducting fewer than ~150 tests per year) where even a 3-year window can't reach 500 tests. Badged “low sample”.

Rankings (easiest, hardest, busiest, best first-time) only include centres clearing the 1,000-test floor in the current statistical period. Centres below the floor remain visible on the interactive map, on their own individual centre detail page, in search and autocomplete, and in city and county aggregations (with a “low sample” badge). They are excluded only from the rankable set so a remote island centre where 60 of 80 candidates happened to pass last year cannot dominate the top of the list. DVSA itself publishes every centre with no numeric threshold (their only suppression rule is single-examiner disclosure); this floor is statistically derived, not DVSA-mandated.

First-time pass rate

First-time pass rate (the share of candidates who pass on their first attempt) is computed across the same time window as the headline pass rate for that centre. It is generally a more honest measure of centre difficulty than overall pass rate, because overall pass rate is inflated at centres where many candidates retake (each retake counts as a fresh test, and retakers pass at higher rates than first-attempt candidates).

Wait-time estimates

DVSA does not publish per-centre wait-time data via API. The estimates on this site are modelled from the following inputs:

• Regional base wait time, derived from the National Audit Office's December 2025 investigation into car driving test waiting times (national average 14-18 weeks, with London running 22+ weeks and rural Scotland running 8-12 weeks).
• Centre's lifetime test volume (higher volume = higher demand pressure = longer wait, all else equal).
• Known high-demand and low-demand centre lists derived from FOI releases and the DVSA Despatch blog.
• A small deterministic variation factor (centre-name hash) so the figure does not feel suspiciously round.

Wait-time figures are estimates for educational and analytical purposes. For a real booking, always check the official DVSA service at gov.uk/book-driving-test, which shows live availability. We label every wait-time figure on the site clearly so this distinction is obvious.

Centre name and geocoding

Centre names match the DVSA register where possible. Where the dataset includes stale name variants (centres that have closed or been renamed), we maintain a manually curated closed-centres list and remove them from the active set. Currently 24 centres are flagged as closed or relocated.

Coordinates are geocoded via OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service. A small number of centres have inaccurate geocoding because the DVSA's own naming convention sometimes points the geocoder to the wrong city (notably Garston Speke and Ashford Middlesex). For these centres we link to the official DVSA centre finder on gov.uk rather than to a Google Maps pin.

Update cadence

The dataset is refreshed each time DVSA publishes a new quarterly release, typically once per quarter. The "Last refreshed" date at the foot of every centre, city, and region page reflects the underlying data file mtime, not the article publication date.

Known limitations

• DVSA does not publish per-centre fault breakdowns. Top-fault data is national, not centre-level.
• DVSA does not publish per-time-of-day pass rates. Articles that mention time-of-day patterns rely on widely-cited industry estimates rather than DVSA-confirmed figures.
• Northern Ireland test data is published by DVA, not DVSA, and uses a different format. Belfast and other NI centres have less depth in our dataset than GB centres.
• Per-centre wait times are modelled, not measured. See the section above.

Reproducibility

The data ingestion pipeline (parsing the DVSA ODS spreadsheets, computing aggregates, geocoding, deduplication) lives in the project repository as a single Node.js script. Anyone with the gov.uk source files can regenerate the dataset locally. The resulting JSON is checked into the repository so the figures shown on the site are deterministic and inspectable.

For the back-story, see the about page. For terms of use of the derived data, see the terms of service.

Image licensing

Photographs sourced from Wikimedia Commons (including assets contributed via geograph.org.uk) are released under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. The original author is preserved in the per-image credit shown alongside the photograph and in the structured data attached to each image. Reuse follows the upstream terms: attribute the original author, link to the licence, and release derivatives under the same licence.

All other images on PassRates.uk (site logo, social cards, data-driven charts, screenshots and original photography) are © PassRates.uk, all rights reserved. Contact hello@passrates.uk for licensing enquiries.

Research published from this dataset

Original analyses we have run on the DVSA quarterly data, with chart, method and limitations sections. Each page is self-contained and citable.

• UK driving test pass rates by month, seasonality analysis , calendar-month volume-weighted pass rate across 3 financial years and 4 UK countries.

Cite this methodology

If you reference this analysis in research, journalism, or machine-readable summaries, please cite the versioned label so readers can trace the figures back to their source.

passrates.uk methodology v1.0 (2026). Underlying data: DVSA quarterly statistical releases (DRT122 series), Open Government Licence v3.0.