Brentwood (London) test centre: 48.5% pass rate, £395 to get through it.

5,791 candidates took the car practical test at Brentwood (London) during 2025/26 and 2,809 of them passed, a pass rate of 48.5%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 217th of 308 on pass rate, and 17th of 24 inside East of England.

That lands within 1.5 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.9 points below the 51.4% East of England average, which makes Brentwood (London) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.06 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Brentwood (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.06 times, or £128. Add 1.06 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 £267. The test cycle at Brentwood (London) is therefore about £395. Testing here therefore costs about £19 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 Brentwood (London) was 3.6 weeks in July 2026, 8.3 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.06 expected retakes add only around 3.8 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 1,636 standard slots inside the booking window here and 2.6% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,890 candidates sat their first test at Brentwood (London) and 1,361 passed, 47.1%, which is 1.4 points below the all-attempts rate. 44 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.52% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Brentwood (London) has fallen by 1.6 points, from 50.1% to 48.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,159 to 5,791 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £21 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.1% and female candidates at 49.2%, a gap of 1.1 points across 3,535 and 2,256 tests. Automatic tests made up 34.1% of the workload and passed at 46.1%, 2.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 44.6% in December 2025 to 53.8% in July 2025, a 9.2-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East of England, Letchworth runs 9.0 points higher at 57.5%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £101 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.