Bradford (Thornbury) test centre: 47.8% pass rate, £375 to get through it.

10,831 candidates took the car practical test at Bradford (Thornbury) during 2025/26 and 5,172 of them passed, a pass rate of 47.8%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 226th of 308 on pass rate, and 21st of 29 inside Yorkshire and The Humber.

That lands within 2.3 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.7 points below the 50.5% Yorkshire and The Humber average, which makes Bradford (Thornbury) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 47.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.09 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bradford (Thornbury) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.09 times, or £130. Add 1.09 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Yorkshire & Humber rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £245. The test cycle at Bradford (Thornbury) is therefore about £375. Testing here therefore costs about £27 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Bradford (Thornbury) was 6.5 weeks in July 2026, 5.4 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.09 expected retakes add only around 7.1 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 3,552 standard slots inside the booking window here and 36.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,366 passes from 4,986 first tests at Bradford (Thornbury), 47.5% against 47.8% for all attempts. 89 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.78% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bradford (Thornbury) has fallen by 2.6 points, from 50.4% to 47.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,362 to 10,831 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £31 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 50.7% and female candidates at 43.5%, a gap of 7.2 points across 6,437 and 4,394 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.6% of the workload and passed at 42.3%, 5.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.0% in October 2025 to 53.6% in August 2025, a 8.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Yorkshire and The Humber runs more than five points ahead of Bradford (Thornbury) 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.