Burgess Hill test centre: 45.5% pass rate, £455 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Burgess Hill conducted 11,237 car practical tests and issued 5,111 passes. The resulting 45.5% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 259th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 29th of 32 in South East.

That is 4.5 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 7.7 points below the 53.2% average for South East. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 45.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.20 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Burgess Hill pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.20 times, or £136. Add 1.20 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South East rate of £38 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £319. The test cycle at Burgess Hill is therefore about £455. Testing here therefore costs about £65 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.

A fail at Burgess Hill costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 14.9 weeks in July 2026, 3.0 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.20 expected retakes that is about 17.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,508 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,481 passes from 5,444 first tests at Burgess Hill, 45.6% against 45.5% for all attempts. 67 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.23% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Burgess Hill has fallen by 1.6 points, from 47.1% to 45.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,511 to 11,237 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £24 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 44.0% and female candidates at 47.3%, a gap of 3.3 points across 6,154 and 5,083 tests. Automatic tests made up 23.2% of the workload and passed at 40.4%, 5.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.4% in November 2025 to 48.4% in March 2026, a 5.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South East, Herne Bay runs 10.5 points higher at 55.9%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £135 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.