Clacton-on-Sea test centre: 48.2% pass rate, £399 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Clacton-on-Sea conducted 4,840 car practical tests and issued 2,334 passes. The resulting 48.2% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 222nd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 18th of 24 in East of England.

That lands within 1.8 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 3.1 points below the 51.4% East of England average, which makes Clacton-on-Sea an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.07 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Clacton-on-Sea pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.07 times, or £129. Add 1.07 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 £271. The test cycle at Clacton-on-Sea is therefore about £399. Testing here therefore costs about £23 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 Clacton-on-Sea costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 14.2 weeks in July 2026, 2.3 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.07 expected retakes that is about 15.2 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,878 standard slots inside the booking window here and 9.7% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,089 passes from 2,229 first tests at Clacton-on-Sea, 48.9% against 48.2% for all attempts. 75 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.36% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Clacton-on-Sea has fallen by 4.6 points, from 52.8% to 48.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,300 to 4,840 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £57 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 46.8% and female candidates at 50.1%, a gap of 3.3 points across 2,718 and 2,122 tests. Automatic tests made up 25.7% of the workload and passed at 43.9%, 4.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 39.5% in December 2025 to 55.3% in June 2025, a 15.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East of England, Stevenage runs 7.1 points higher at 55.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £84 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.