Louth test centre: 53.9% pass rate, £318 to get through it.

Louth is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 740 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 399 were passes, giving 53.9%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 117th of 308 nationally and 9th of 20 in East Midlands.

That is 3.9 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 3.1 points above the 50.8% East Midlands 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 53.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.85 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Louth pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.85 times, or £115. Add 0.85 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £203. The test cycle at Louth is therefore about £318. Testing here therefore saves about £44 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Louth costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.1 weeks in July 2026, 3.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.85 expected retakes that is about 12.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 206 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.4% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 414 first attempts at Louth, 232 passed, a rate of 56.0%, which is 2.1 points above the all-attempts figure. 20 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.83% 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 Louth has fallen by 3.3 points, from 57.2% to 53.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 551 to 740 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £32 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 56.5% and female candidates at 51.3%, a gap of 5.2 points across 368 and 372 tests. Automatic tests made up 17.4% of the workload and passed at 41.1%, 12.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 44.2% in August 2025 to 67.2% in July 2025, a 23.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Wellingborough runs 6.1 points higher at 60.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £56 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.