Gloucester test centre: 47.8% pass rate, £405 to get through it.

7,420 candidates took the car practical test at Gloucester during 2025/26 and 3,545 of them passed, a pass rate of 47.8%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 225th of 308 on pass rate, and 14th of 21 inside South West.

That lands within 2.3 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 4.0 points below the 51.7% South West average, which makes Gloucester an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 47.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.09 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Gloucester pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.09 times, or £130. Add 1.09 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South West rate of £36 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £275. The test cycle at Gloucester is therefore about £405. Testing here therefore costs about £29 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.

The queue is the expensive part at Gloucester. DVSA recorded a median wait of 19 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 7.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.09 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 20.8 extra weeks of waiting, close to 5 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 2,843 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.3% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,854 passes from 3,837 first tests at Gloucester, 48.3% against 47.8% for all attempts. 70 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.82% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Gloucester has fallen by 4.8 points, from 52.6% to 47.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,994 to 7,420 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £60 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Gloucester, 47.6% against 47.9%. Automatic tests made up 23.0% of the workload and passed at 36.5%, 11.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.1% in February 2026 to 57.0% in May 2025, a 14.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Yeovil runs 15.6 points higher at 63.4%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £162 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.