Revealed: easiest and hardest places to pass your driving test 2025
Where you take your driving test can have a big impact on how hard, or easy it is to pass. Let’s look at the latest numbers from the DVSA…
Wherever you do it, passing your driving test is certainly no walk in the park, yet statistically it seems to be trickier in some places than others.
Auto Express analysis of the latest data from the DVSA (Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency) shows that if you’re after the best odds of passing your test, the town of Dorchester is the place to head, with more built-up areas in London, Liverpool and the Midlands among the hardest locations.
The above conclusion was drawn by combing through the most recent 12 months of UK practical driving test data that was logged between April 2024 and March 2025. In the interest of fairness, we’ve excluded test centres that conducted fewer than 1,000 tests over the year-long period; these are typically located in remote areas where there is very little in the way of traffic on the roads, roundabouts are rare and only a handful of tests are taken.
What is perhaps most interesting about the numbers is how drastically pass rates can change depending on where you take your test. You might assume that everyone is taking the same driving test so they would be on a level playing field, but this certainly isn’t the case.
Dorchester posted a 66.7 per cent pass rate from around 4,500 tests, while the city of Wolverhampton almost 180 miles away conducted 11,719 tests in the same period, but only around 33.4 per cent, or one in three, resulted in a pass being awarded. The average pass rate for UK driving test centres as a whole over the period analysed was 48.7 per cent
While there are some outliers, particularly Chichester which saw the third-highest pass rate in the country, it’s typically the busy cities such as London and Liverpool that are the most difficult to pass your test in. In these kinds of driving environments, high levels of traffic, complicated junctions, multi-lane roads and an abundance of signage can provide an extra challenge for learner drivers.
According to the DVSA, the number one reason for someone failing a driving test is lack of observation at junctions. This is followed by failing to judge the speed of an approaching vehicle, entering a roundabout with a vehicle approaching from the right and making no effective observations at all.
And in case you were wondering, those identifying as male have a pass rate of 43.1 per cent, while females are typically more likely to pass their driving test with a 47.2 per cent success rate. The pass rates for those taking the automatic test is 4.8 per cent below the overall average pass rate at 43.9 per cent.
The hardest places to pass your driving test in the UK
Below are the top 15 toughest driving test centres by pass rate in 2024/2025…
| Test centre | Tests conducted | Passes | Pass rate (%) | |
| 1 | Wolverhampton | 11,719 | 3,920 | 33.4 |
| 2 | Featherstone | 14,070 | 4,798 | 34.1 |
| 3 | Wednesbury | 8,335 | 3,036 | 36.4 |
| 4 | Chingford (London) | 13,235 | 4,825 | 36.5 |
| 5 | Gateshead | 8,109 | 3,029 | 37.4 |
| 6 | Leicester (Cannock Street) | 11,638 | 4,384 | 37.7 |
| 7 | Glasgow (Shieldhall) | 6,792 | 2,563 | 37.7 |
| 8 | Barking (Tanner Street) | 7,499 | 2,842 | 37.9 |
| 9 | Belvedere (London) | 4,337 | 1,662 | 38.3 |
| 10 | Speke (Liverpool) | 1,079 | 416 | 38.6 |
| 11 | Norris Green (Liverpool) | 13,265 | 5,131 | 38.7 |
| 12 | Stirling | 4,111 | 1,589 | 38.7 |
| 13 | Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) | 6,450 | 2,503 | 38.4 |
| 14 | Hamilton | 5,608 | 2,213 | 39.5 |
| 15 | Banbury | 8,241 | 3,287 | 39.9 |
The easiest places to pass your driving test in the UK
Below are the UK driving test centres that carried out more than 1,000 tests with the highest pass rates for 2024/2025.
A few test centres in remote locations have higher pass rates, with the test centre on the Isles of Scilly topping the list with an overall pass rate of 87.5 per cent, albeit from a tiny sample of just eight tests.
| Test centre | Tests conducted | Passes | Pass rate (%) | |
| 1 | Dorchester | 4,561 | 3042 | 66.7 |
| 2 | Kendal (Oxenholme Road) | 2,149 | 1393 | 64.8 |
| 3 | Chichester | 5,295 | 3,400 | 64.2 |
| 4 | Bangor | 3,433 | 2,202 | 64.1 |
| 5 | Melton Mowbray | 2,486 | 1,589 | 63.9 |
| 6 | Newtown | 1,740 | 1,109 | 63.7 |
| 7 | Ipswich | 10,724 | 6,762 | 63.1 |
| 8 | Haddington | 1,890 | 1,175 | 62.2 |
| 9 | Barrow In Furness | 1,735 | 1,074 | 61.9 |
| 10 | Barry | 1,621 | 1,002 | 61.8 |
| 11 | Monmouth | 1,407 | 861 | 61.2 |
| 12 | Abergavenny | 4,650 | 2,841 | 61.1 |
| 13 | Dundee | 5,851 | 3,531 | 59.7 |
| 14 | Yeovil | 5,754 | 3,433 | 59.7 |
| 15 | Lee On The Solent | 10,409 | 6,202 | 59.6 |
Have you taken your driving test at any of these locations? Let us know what it was like in the comments…
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