Chippenham test centre: 56.4% pass rate, £304 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Chippenham conducted 9,629 car practical tests and issued 5,435 passes. The resulting 56.4% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 85th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 5th of 21 in South West.

That is 6.4 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 4.7 points above the 51.7% South West 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 56.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.77 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Chippenham pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.77 times, or £110. Add 0.77 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South West rate of £36 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £194. The test cycle at Chippenham is therefore about £304. Testing here therefore saves about £72 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Chippenham ran to a median 7.7 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.2 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.77 expected retakes that is roughly 5.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,886 standard slots inside the booking window here and 22.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,725 passes from 4,870 first tests at Chippenham, 56.0% against 56.4% for all attempts. 204 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.19% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Chippenham has risen by 10.6 points, from 45.9% to 56.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,610 to 9,629 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £128 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.2% and female candidates at 55.6%, a gap of 1.6 points across 5,116 and 4,513 tests. Automatic tests made up 18.5% of the workload and passed at 50.6%, 5.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.2% in March 2026 to 60.0% in June 2025, a 8.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South West runs more than five points ahead of Chippenham 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.