Reading test centre: 55.4% pass rate, £326 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Reading conducted 9,237 car practical tests and issued 5,118 passes. The resulting 55.4% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 102nd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 14th of 32 in South East.

That is 5.4 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 2.2 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 55.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.80 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Reading pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.80 times, or £112. Add 0.80 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 £214. The test cycle at Reading is therefore about £326. Testing here therefore saves about £64 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Reading costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.9 weeks in July 2026, 2.0 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.80 expected retakes that is about 11.2 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 4,329 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.6% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,631 passes from 4,749 first tests at Reading, 55.4% against 55.4% for all attempts. 169 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.56% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Reading has risen by 2.1 points, from 53.3% to 55.4%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 11,031 to 9,237 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £24 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Reading, 55.6% against 55.1%. Automatic tests made up 41.1% of the workload and passed at 52.7%, 2.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.4% in December 2025 to 62.3% in September 2025, a 12.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South East, Lee On The Solent runs 7.8 points higher at 63.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £73 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.