Pwllheli test centre: 68.1% pass rate, £196 to get through it.

Pwllheli is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 737 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 502 were passes, giving 68.1%. 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 14th of 308 nationally and 1st of 21 in Wales.

That is 18.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 15.7 points above the 52.4% Wales 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 68.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.47 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Pwllheli pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.47 times, or £91. Add 0.47 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £105. The test cycle at Pwllheli is therefore about £196. Testing here therefore saves about £152 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Pwllheli costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 12.7 weeks in July 2026, 0.8 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.47 expected retakes that is about 5.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 275 standard slots inside the booking window here and 9.5% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 474 candidates sat their first test at Pwllheli and 316 passed, 66.7%, which is 1.4 points below the all-attempts rate. 19 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.01% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Pwllheli has risen by 4.6 points, from 63.5% to 68.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 534 to 737 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £31 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Pwllheli, 68.5% against 67.8%. Automatic tests made up 10.9% of the workload and passed at 58.8%, 9.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 59.6% in May 2025 to 74.2% in November 2025, a 14.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Wales runs more than five points ahead of Pwllheli 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.