Lee On The Solent test centre: 63.2% pass rate, £253 to get through it.

8,502 candidates took the car practical test at Lee On The Solent during 2025/26 and 5,374 of them passed, a pass rate of 63.2%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 30th of 308 on pass rate, and 2nd of 32 inside South East.

That is 13.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 10.0 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 63.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.58 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Lee On The Solent pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.58 times, or £98. Add 0.58 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 £155. The test cycle at Lee On The Solent is therefore about £253. Testing here therefore saves about £137 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Lee On The Solent. DVSA recorded a median wait of 20 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 8.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.58 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 11.6 extra weeks of waiting, close to 3 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 2,509 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.9% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,817 first attempts at Lee On The Solent, 3,156 passed, a rate of 65.5%, which is 2.3 points above the all-attempts figure. 321 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.66% 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 Lee On The Solent has fallen by 2.4 points, from 65.6% to 63.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,137 to 8,502 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £19 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 64.2% and female candidates at 62.1%, a gap of 2.2 points across 4,449 and 4,053 tests. Automatic tests made up 28.9% of the workload and passed at 53.1%, 10.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 59.3% in October 2025 to 67.4% in January 2026, a 8.1-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 Lee On The Solent 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.