Bishops Stortford test centre: 51.3% pass rate, £360 to get through it.
DVSA conducted 6,409 car practical tests here between April 2025 and March 2026, and 3,290 candidates passed. On the expected-attempts arithmetic that is 1.95 attempts, £121 in DVSA fees and £239 of retake lessons before a licence.
- Pass rate
- 51.3%
- Tests conducted
- 6,409
- National rank
- 173
- Median wait
- 10.4 wk
+1.3 pts vs national
3,290 passes
of 308 ranked centres
July 2026
What passing at Bishops Stortford costs
Expected cost of the test cycle for the average candidate at a 51.3% centre.
- Expected attempts (1 ÷ pass rate)1.95
- DVSA fees at £62 weekday£121
- Retake lessons (0.95 × 7 hr × £36)£239
- Test cycle at this centre£360
- Against a national-average centre-£16
- Extra queue time from retakes9.9 wk
Add the parts that do not change with the centre and the full bill from provisional to licence at East of England lesson rates is about £2,037: £34 provisional, £23 theory, 45 hours of tuition at £36 (£1,620) and the test cycle above. Full cost stack.
What 51.3% at Bishops Stortford actually means for your budget.
Over 2025/26 the examiners at Bishops Stortford conducted 6,409 car practical tests and issued 3,290 passes. The resulting 51.3% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 173rd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 10th of 24 in East of England.
That lands within 1.3 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.0 points below the 51.4% East of England average, which makes Bishops Stortford an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.
Turn 51.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.95 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bishops Stortford pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.95 times, or £121. Add 0.95 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East of England rate of £36 an hour (the closest published band on our regional lesson table), and the extra lessons come to £239. The test cycle at Bishops Stortford is therefore about £360. Testing here therefore saves about £16 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.
Waiting time at Bishops Stortford ran to a median 10.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.95 expected retakes that is roughly 9.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,960 standard slots inside the booking window here and 7.9% of them were still free to book.
First attempts track the headline closely: 1,665 passes from 3,272 first tests at Bishops Stortford, 50.9% against 51.3% for all attempts. 40 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.22% of them.
Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bishops Stortford has risen by 4.0 points, from 47.4% to 51.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,127 to 6,409 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £51 to the average candidate.
Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Bishops Stortford, 51.6% against 51.0%. Automatic tests made up 27.3% of the workload and passed at 42.8%, 8.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.2% in May 2025 to 56.0% in April 2025, a 6.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.
None of the similarly sized centres in East of England runs more than five points ahead of Bishops Stortford on pass rate, so travelling elsewhere is unlikely to pay for itself once you add an unfamiliar route, the travel and the settling-in lessons. The cheaper lever here is preparation on the roads your instructor already knows.
Bishops Stortford vs its region and the country.
- Rank in East of England
- 10 of 24
- First-attempt rate
- 50.9%
- Zero-fault first passes
- 40
- Automatic pass rate
- 42.8%
- Male candidates
- 51.6%
- Female candidates
- 51.0%
-0.0 pts vs region
3,272 first tests
1.22% of first attempts
27.3% of tests here
3,520 tests
2,889 tests
Up 4.0 points since 2021/22.
Dashed line: the 50.03% national pass rate for 2025/26.
Weeks between booking and taking the test, DVSA table DRT122F. Latest reading 10.4 weeks, 1.5 below the 11.9-week median across all centres.
A 17-year-old passes at 61.9% here. A 25-year-old passes at 43.9%.
DVSA publishes Bishops Stortford broken down by single year of age, and the two ends of that range behave like different centres. 1,687 tests were taken here by 17-year-olds and 61.9% of them passed; 164 were taken by 25-year-olds and 43.9% passed. That is 18.0 points, against 14.9 points between the same two ages across Great Britain.
Put that through the same arithmetic the rest of this page uses and the gap stops being academic. A 17-year-old at Bishops Stortford expects 1.62 attempts, £255 in fees and retake lessons. A 25-year-old expects 2.28 attempts and £463, £208 more on identical £62 fees and the same £36 East of England lesson rate. The only thing that moved was the pass rate.
17-year-olds here pass 1.7 points below the 63.6% that 17-year-olds manage nationally. Against East of England, where the same age passes 64.1%, they are 2.2 points behind. Either way, budgeting a 17-year-old against this centre's all-ages 51.3% is pessimistic by 10.6 points.
DVSA withheld the counts for ages 16 and 24 at Bishops Stortford, which it does where a cell is small enough that publishing the numbers could identify candidates. For age 24 the agency still printed a pass rate; those rates appear in the table below exactly as published, and are used for nothing else on this page, because a percentage with no denominator cannot carry a cost estimate.
None of this says a 17-year-old drives better. DVSA counts who passed, not why. The most likely reading is course continuity: a candidate testing at 17 is usually mid-course with weekly lessons behind them, while an older first-timer more often books a test after a gap. That is a lever, not a birthday, and it is the one part of this page you can actually change.
- Age 17 here
- 61.9%
- Age 25 here
- 43.9%
- Age gap
- +18.0 pts
- Age 17 vs country
- -1.7 pts
1,687 tests
164 tests
national gap +14.9 pts
63.6% nationally
Pass rate by age at Bishops Stortford
DVSA table DRT122D, April 2025 to March 2026. Dashed line is the same age across Great Britain.
What each age costs at Bishops Stortford, on the same arithmetic as the rest of this page.
Expected attempts is 1 ÷ the pass rate for that age, fees are £62 an attempt and retake lessons are 7 hours at the East of England rate of £36. Ages where DVSA withheld the counts are shown as withheld and are not priced: a rate the agency would not put a denominator against is not a rate to budget from.
| Age | Tests conducted | Passes | Pass rate | Expected attempts | Test cycle cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | withheld | withheld | not published | not priced | not priced |
| 17 | 1,687 | 1,044 | 61.9% | 1.62 | £255 |
| 18 | 1,092 | 573 | 52.5% | 1.91 | £346 |
| 19 | 462 | 250 | 54.1% | 1.85 | £328 |
| 20 | 287 | 137 | 47.7% | 2.09 | £406 |
| 21 | 241 | 140 | 58.1% | 1.72 | £289 |
| 22 | 188 | 102 | 54.3% | 1.84 | £327 |
| 23 | 187 | 88 | 47.1% | 2.12 | £415 |
| 24 | withheld | withheld | 50.0% | not priced | not priced |
| 25 | 164 | 72 | 43.9% | 2.28 | £463 |
| Under 26 | 4,489 | 2,497 | 55.6% | 1.80 | £313 |
| All ages | 6,409 | 3,290 | 51.3% | 1.95 | £360 |
The under-26 row is DVSA’s own block total from DRT122D and counts the withheld cells, so it will exceed the sum of the ages printed above it wherever a cell is withheld (here: ages 16 and 24). The all-ages row is DRT122A, the figure the rest of this page uses. Nothing on this table is estimated or back-filled.
What the age gap is worth at Bishops Stortford
- Expected attempts, age 171.62
- Expected attempts, age 252.28
- Test cycle at age 17£255
- Test cycle at age 25£463
- Cost of waiting from 17 to 25+£208
- Extra queue time from the extra retakes6.9 wk
Pass rates are DVSA’s. The pounds are ours, on the same fee and lesson rate the rest of this page uses, applied to each age’s published rate and nothing else. Age is not the cause: the DVSA figures describe who passed, not why, and a 17-year-old mid-course typically arrives with recent, continuous tuition behind them. The national age curve.
Every published financial year at Bishops Stortford.
| Financial year | Conducted | Passed | Pass rate | Expected attempts | Test cycle cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 6,409 | 3,290 | 51.3% | 1.95 | £360 |
| 2024/25 | 6,826 | 3,443 | 50.4% | 1.98 | £371 |
| 2023/24 | 8,006 | 3,966 | 49.5% | 2.02 | £382 |
| 2022/23 | 5,315 | 2,689 | 50.6% | 1.98 | £369 |
| 2021/22 | 5,127 | 2,428 | 47.4% | 2.11 | £411 |
| 2020/21 | 1,379 | 685 | 49.7% | 2.01 | £380 |
| 2019/20 | 6,238 | 2,884 | 46.2% | 2.16 | £427 |
| 2018/19 | 6,648 | 2,908 | 43.7% | 2.29 | £466 |
| 2017/18 | 7,248 | 3,242 | 44.7% | 2.24 | £450 |
| 2016/17 | 7,997 | 3,627 | 45.4% | 2.21 | £440 |
Cost columns apply today’s £62 fee and the current £36 lesson rate to each year’s pass rate, so the column isolates what the pass rate does to the bill. The fee itself has moved over time; see fee history.
A 6.7-point swing across the year.
Monthly figures are why a single quarter is a poor guide. Nothing about the centre changed between May 2025 and April 2025; the mix of candidates did.
| Month | Conducted | Passed | Pass rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2025 | 479 | 268 | 56.0% |
| May 2025 | 457 | 225 | 49.2% |
| June 2025 | 505 | 259 | 51.3% |
| July 2025 | 552 | 275 | 49.8% |
| August 2025 | 431 | 213 | 49.4% |
| September 2025 | 547 | 288 | 52.6% |
| October 2025 | 557 | 284 | 51.0% |
| November 2025 | 523 | 259 | 49.5% |
| December 2025 | 434 | 219 | 50.5% |
| January 2026 | 550 | 302 | 54.9% |
| February 2026 | 680 | 339 | 49.9% |
| March 2026 | 694 | 359 | 51.7% |
The five East of England centres closest in size to Bishops Stortford.
Matched on annual test volume rather than distance, because a centre doing 6,409 tests a year faces a comparable road and traffic mix. Cost column uses the East of England lesson rate of £36 throughout, so the only variable is the pass rate.
| Centre | Pass rate | Tests | Median wait | Test cycle cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bishops Stortford (this centre) | 51.3% | 6,409 | 10.4 wk | £360 |
| Kings Lynn | 51.9% | 6,694 | 15.4 wk | £353 |
| Brentwood (London) | 48.5% | 5,791 | 3.6 wk | £395 |
| Borehamwood (London) | 50.8% | 7,195 | 10.9 wk | £367 |
| St Albans | 50.7% | 7,336 | 6.7 wk | £367 |
| Loughton (London) | 47.0% | 7,376 | 9.4 wk | £416 |
Higher pass rate in East of England
- Kings Lynn51.9%
- Peterborough52.8%
- Bedford53.7%
- Cambridge (Brookmount Court)53.8%
Lower pass rate in East of England
- Borehamwood (London)50.8%
- St Albans50.7%
- Colchester50.6%
- Tilbury50.4%
Source and provenance
Pass rates, test volumes, gender splits and waiting times on this page are published statistics from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), taken from Driving test and theory test data: cars, tables DRT122A (Car driving test pass rates by gender and month: test centres, updated 2026-06-25), DRT122C (Car driving test pass rates by first driving attempt and gender, including zero faults: test centres, updated 2026-06-25), DRT122D (Car driving test pass rates by age (17 to 25 year olds), year and test centre, updated 2026-06-25), DRT122E (Automatic car driving test pass rates by gender: test centres, updated 2026-06-25) and DRT122F (Car driving test waiting times and availability by driving test centre, updated 2026-08-12). Centre-level figures cover the April 2025 to March 2026 financial year; the national quarterly series runs to June 2026. Snapshot taken 2026-09-04.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Cost figures are drivingtestcost.com’s own, from the GOV.UK fee schedule and our regional lesson survey; DVSA publishes no prices and none of the money on this page comes from DVSA.
drivingtestcost.com is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the DVSA, the DVA or GOV.UK. Pass rates are DVSA published statistics reproduced under the Open Government Licence, not our assessment of any centre. Great Britain only; Northern Ireland tests are run separately by the DVA. DVSA cautions that centre figures below about 100 tests a year are not robust for comparison.
Age figures are single years of age from DRT122D and are reproduced exactly as published, withheld cells included. DVSA replaces the counts in small age cells with “..”, in most cases while still printing that cell’s pass rate; those cells are shown here as withheld and are excluded from every comparison, ranking and cost figure on this page. Nothing withheld is reconstructed from the block total.