Darlington test centre: 47.1% pass rate, £360 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Darlington conducted 12,183 car practical tests and issued 5,740 passes. The resulting 47.1% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 234th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 10th of 11 in North East.

That lands within 2.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.3 points below the 48.4% North East average, which makes Darlington an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 47.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.12 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Darlington pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.12 times, or £132. Add 1.12 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North East rate of £29 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £228. The test cycle at Darlington is therefore about £360. Testing here therefore costs about £33 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 Darlington ran to a median 8.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 3.0 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.12 expected retakes that is roughly 10 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,538 standard slots inside the booking window here and 37.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,899 first attempts at Darlington, 2,395 passed, a rate of 48.9%, which is 1.8 points above the all-attempts figure. 212 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.33% 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 Darlington has fallen by 7.8 points, from 55.0% to 47.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,317 to 12,183 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £80 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 44.7% and female candidates at 51.3%, a gap of 6.6 points across 7,787 and 4,396 tests. Automatic tests made up 29.3% of the workload and passed at 40.5%, 6.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.8% in November 2025 to 51.7% in April 2025, a 7.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North East, Durham runs 6.1 points higher at 53.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £64 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.