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 2007 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.

Pass rate calculation

For each test centre, the lifetime pass rate is computed as:

passRate = (totalPassed across all years) / (totalTests across all years) * 100

This is a volume-weighted average, meaning years with more tests carry proportionally more weight than quiet years. We do not use the simple mean of yearly rates because that would over-weight low-volume years (typically 2020-21 due to COVID disruption).

Pass rates are rounded to one decimal place for display.

First-time pass rate

First-time pass rate is computed separately from DRT122C's per-centre first- attempt counts:

firstTimePassRate = (firstAttemptPassed across all years) / (firstAttempts across all years) * 100

First-time pass rate 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).

Why centres under 500 tests are excluded from rankings

For ranking pages (easiest, hardest, best first-time, busiest), centres with fewer than 500 lifetime tests are filtered out. The reason is statistical: with very small samples, even a swing of five candidates can move a centre's published pass rate by a percentage point. A centre that has run 80 tests in its history could trivially top the "easiest" list with 60 passes, but that is not a stable signal of difficulty.

The 500-test threshold is conservative. It excludes around 50 of the 625 centres in the dataset, mostly very small remote and Scottish island centres. They still appear on city and region pages with a "low sample" flag, but they are not eligible for the top-50 leaderboards.

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 KNOWN_CLOSED 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.