Erith (London) test centre: 51.6% pass rate, £402 to get through it.

Erith (London) is a mid-sized centre, putting 5,809 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 3,000 passed, so the centre finished the year on 51.6% and 163rd of 308 nationally, 7th of 26 within London.

That lands within 1.6 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.9 points above the 48.8% London average, which makes Erith (London) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.94 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Erith (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.94 times, or £120. Add 0.94 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the London rate of £43 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £282. The test cycle at Erith (London) is therefore about £402. Testing here therefore saves about £23 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Erith (London) was 7 weeks in July 2026, 4.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.94 expected retakes add only around 6.6 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 3,303 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.4% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,773 candidates sat their first test at Erith (London) and 1,382 passed, 49.8%, which is 1.8 points below the all-attempts rate. 131 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.72% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Erith (London) has risen by 23.3 points, from 28.4% to 51.6%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,797 to 5,809 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £577 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Erith (London), 52.0% against 51.1%. Automatic tests accounted for 52.4% of the 5,809 tests and passed at 50.4%, close enough to the overall rate that gearbox choice is a comfort decision here, not a pass-rate one. Month to month the rate ran from 45.5% in August 2025 to 57.0% in November 2025, a 11.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in London runs more than five points ahead of Erith (London) 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.