Loughton (London) test centre: 47.0% pass rate, £416 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Loughton (London) conducted 7,376 car practical tests and issued 3,465 passes. The resulting 47.0% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 237th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 20th of 24 in East of England.

That is 3.0 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 4.4 points below the 51.4% average for East of England. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 47.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.13 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Loughton (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.13 times, or £132. Add 1.13 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East of England rate of £36 an hour (the closest published band on our regional lesson table), and the extra lessons come to £284. The test cycle at Loughton (London) is therefore about £416. Testing here therefore costs about £40 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.

Waiting time at Loughton (London) ran to a median 9.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 2.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.13 expected retakes that is roughly 10.6 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,690 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.8% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,359 first attempts at Loughton (London), 1,612 passed, a rate of 48.0%, which is 1.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 114 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.39% 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 Loughton (London) has risen by 3.6 points, from 43.4% to 47.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,749 to 7,376 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £55 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.1% and female candidates at 45.2%, a gap of 3.0 points across 4,474 and 2,902 tests. Automatic tests accounted for 44.0% of the 7,376 tests and passed at 45.3%, 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 45.1% in August 2025 to 50.3% in February 2026, a 5.2-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East of England runs more than five points ahead of Loughton (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.