Hastings (Ore) test centre: 52.4% pass rate, £360 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Hastings (Ore) conducted 3,892 car practical tests and issued 2,039 passes. The resulting 52.4% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 145th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 19th of 32 in South East.

That lands within 2.4 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.8 points below the 53.2% South East average, which makes Hastings (Ore) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.91 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Hastings (Ore) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.91 times, or £118. Add 0.91 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 £242. The test cycle at Hastings (Ore) is therefore about £360. Testing here therefore saves about £30 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Hastings (Ore) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 17.1 weeks in July 2026, 5.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.91 expected retakes that is about 15.5 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,314 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 983 passes from 1,903 first tests at Hastings (Ore), 51.7% against 52.4% for all attempts. 36 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.89% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Hastings (Ore) has risen by 3.3 points, from 49.1% to 52.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,719 to 3,892 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £42 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 51.9% and female candidates at 53.1%, a gap of 1.2 points across 2,168 and 1,724 tests. Automatic tests accounted for 29.5% of the 3,892 tests and passed at 51.6%, 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 49.1% in March 2026 to 56.8% in October 2025, a 7.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South East runs more than five points ahead of Hastings (Ore) 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.