Crawley test centre: 42.7% pass rate, £502 to get through it.

Crawley is a high-volume centre, putting 11,305 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 4,831 passed, so the centre finished the year on 42.7% and 279th of 308 nationally, 30th of 32 within South East.

That is 7.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 10.4 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 42.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.34 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Crawley pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.34 times, or £145. Add 1.34 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 £357. The test cycle at Crawley is therefore about £502. Testing here therefore costs about £112 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.

Waiting time at Crawley ran to a median 10.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.34 expected retakes that is roughly 13.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,127 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.3% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,279 passes from 5,334 first tests at Crawley, 42.7% against 42.7% for all attempts. 81 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.52% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Crawley has risen by 3.6 points, from 39.1% to 42.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,483 to 11,305 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £71 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 41.6% and female candidates at 44.5%, a gap of 2.8 points across 6,915 and 4,390 tests. Automatic tests made up 29.8% of the workload and passed at 39.0%, 3.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 40.0% in March 2026 to 47.1% in December 2025, a 7.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South East, Herne Bay runs 13.2 points higher at 55.9%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £181 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.