Chichester test centre: 61.6% pass rate, £267 to get through it.

Chichester is a mid-sized centre, putting 6,672 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 4,109 passed, so the centre finished the year on 61.6% and 39th of 308 nationally, 3rd of 32 within South East.

That is 11.6 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 8.4 points above the 53.2% South East average. A centre in this band is usually working quieter road layouts with fewer forced lane decisions, not a softer marking standard: the DVSA marking sheet is national.

Turn 61.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.62 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Chichester pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.62 times, or £101. Add 0.62 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 £166. The test cycle at Chichester is therefore about £267. Testing here therefore saves about £123 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Chichester was 4.7 weeks in July 2026, 7.2 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.62 expected retakes add only around 2.9 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 2,530 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.9% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,703 first attempts at Chichester, 2,343 passed, a rate of 63.3%, which is 1.7 points above the all-attempts figure. 304 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 8.21% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Chichester has fallen by 4.2 points, from 65.8% to 61.6%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,668 to 6,672 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £34 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Chichester, 61.5% against 61.7%. Automatic tests made up 19.5% of the workload and passed at 54.7%, 6.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 59.1% in March 2026 to 66.2% in May 2025, a 7.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South East runs more than five points ahead of Chichester 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.