Eastbourne test centre: 55.4% pass rate, £326 to get through it.

Eastbourne is a mid-sized centre, putting 6,031 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 3,342 passed, so the centre finished the year on 55.4% and 101st of 308 nationally, 13th of 32 within South East.

That is 5.4 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 2.2 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 55.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.80 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Eastbourne pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.80 times, or £112. Add 0.80 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 £214. The test cycle at Eastbourne is therefore about £326. Testing here therefore saves about £64 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Eastbourne costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.7 weeks in July 2026, 1.8 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.80 expected retakes that is about 11 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,742 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.1% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,065 first attempts at Eastbourne, 1,736 passed, a rate of 56.6%, which is 1.2 points above the all-attempts figure. 60 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.96% 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 Eastbourne has risen by 0.8 points, from 54.6% to 55.4%. Volume has been steady, 6,220 tests then against 6,031 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £8 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 54.8% and female candidates at 56.2%, a gap of 1.4 points across 3,468 and 2,563 tests. Automatic tests made up 26.6% of the workload and passed at 50.2%, 5.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.5% in August 2025 to 63.2% in May 2025, a 13.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South East, Tunbridge Wells runs 9.1 points higher at 64.5%. 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.