Chertsey (London) test centre: 52.9% pass rate, £354 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Chertsey (London) conducted 9,082 car practical tests and issued 4,804 passes. The resulting 52.9% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 136th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 17th of 32 in South East.

That lands within 2.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.3 points below the 53.2% South East average, which makes Chertsey (London) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.89 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Chertsey (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.89 times, or £117. Add 0.89 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 £237. The test cycle at Chertsey (London) is therefore about £354. Testing here therefore saves about £36 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Chertsey (London) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.6 weeks in July 2026, 3.7 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.89 expected retakes that is about 13.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 3,777 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,547 passes from 4,850 first tests at Chertsey (London), 52.5% against 52.9% for all attempts. 129 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.66% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Chertsey (London) has fallen by 0.6 points, from 53.5% to 52.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,066 to 9,082 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £7 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 53.8% and female candidates at 51.9%, a gap of 1.9 points across 4,780 and 4,302 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.4% of the workload and passed at 47.3%, 5.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.3% in April 2025 to 56.3% in November 2025, a 7.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South East, Lee On The Solent runs 10.3 points higher at 63.2%. 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.