Pembroke Dock test centre: 50.1% pass rate, £346 to get through it.

Pembroke Dock is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,769 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 887 were passes, giving 50.1%. 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 196th of 308 nationally and 17th of 21 in Wales.

That lands within 0.1 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.2 points below the 52.4% Wales average, which makes Pembroke Dock an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 50.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.99 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Pembroke Dock pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.99 times, or £124. Add 0.99 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £223. The test cycle at Pembroke Dock is therefore about £346. That is within £2 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Pembroke Dock is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

A fail at Pembroke Dock costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.8 weeks in July 2026, 1.9 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.99 expected retakes that is about 13.7 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 828 standard slots inside the booking window here and 19.6% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 490 passes from 971 first tests at Pembroke Dock, 50.5% against 50.1% for all attempts. 55 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.66% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Pembroke Dock has fallen by 12.4 points, from 62.5% to 50.1%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 2,459 to 1,769 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £113 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 49.6% and female candidates at 50.7%, a gap of 1.1 points across 939 and 830 tests. Automatic tests made up 16.5% of the workload and passed at 43.1%, 7.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 39.9% in December 2025 to 56.8% in May 2025, a 16.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Brecon runs 8.6 points higher at 58.7%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £83 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.