Pass rates across
England, Scotland and Wales.
DVSA car-test pass rates differ noticeably between England, Scotland and Wales. Wales tops the comparison on a car-only basis, at 54.3%, with smaller-town and rural centres pulling its average up, while dense urban centres finish well below the national average.
Browse by country
Pass-rate comparison
Average pass rate by country
vs UK avg 48.7%Which UK country has the easiest tests?
Ranked by car-only weighted average, the UK countries fall in the following order: Wales at 54.3%, Scotland at 50.3%, England at 48.5%. The spread between the reported countries is small in absolute terms, a few percentage points, but it is consistent across years and reflects real geographic differences, not random variation.
Wales tops the ranking for a structural reason: a meaningful proportion of the leading countries' DVSA centres serve small towns and rural areas, where test routes are shorter, traffic is lighter, and multi-lane roundabouts are essentially absent. Remote and island centres, such as Lerwick, Stornoway and other small-network sites, routinely produce the highest pass rates in the United Kingdom.
Dense urban centres, by contrast, drag a country's average down, inner London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, where routes are naturally more demanding and pass rates can sit 15 percentage points below the national average. Wales sits between the extremes: its average is lifted by smaller-town centres but tempered by Cardiff, Swansea and other urban areas. Northern Ireland is administered by the DVA, not the DVSA, so it sits outside this dataset and no Northern Ireland average is reported here. The headline takeaway: country-level averages are useful framing, but the centre you pick matters more than the country it sits in.
Frequently asked
Which UK country has the highest driving test pass rate?
Wales has the highest average car-test pass rate of the UK countries we can compare, at 54.3%, against a UK national average of 48.7%. Centres in smaller towns and rural areas, where routes are shorter and traffic is lighter, pull the average upwards.
Why does Wales have a higher pass rate than the UK average?
Wales's car-test pass rate sits above the UK average mainly because a meaningful share of its centres are in smaller towns and rural areas, where test routes are shorter, traffic is lighter, and fewer multi-lane junctions appear. Countries with a higher concentration of dense urban centres, such as London, Birmingham and Manchester, tend to sit lower because those routes are naturally more demanding.
How many DVSA driving test centres are there in the UK?
Across Great Britain there are 323 DVSA driving test centres in the dataset, distributed across 3 countries (England, Scotland and Wales). Northern Ireland is run by the DVA and sits outside the DVSA dataset.
Are driving tests easier in Wales or Northern Ireland?
Wales hosts smaller centres than England on average, which tends to nudge its pass-rate average upwards. Northern Ireland is administered by the DVA, not the DVSA, so it sits outside this dataset and we do not report a Northern Ireland average. As ever, the actual difficulty of any given test depends on the centre rather than the country, even within Wales there is a wide spread between rural and city centres.
Source: DVSA quarterly statistical release, Open Government Licence v3.0