Rhyl test centre: 56.9% pass rate, £278 to get through it.

4,011 candidates took the car practical test at Rhyl during 2025/26 and 2,284 of them passed, a pass rate of 56.9%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 78th of 308 on pass rate, and 8th of 21 inside Wales.

That is 6.9 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 4.6 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 56.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.76 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Rhyl pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.76 times, or £109. Add 0.76 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £169. The test cycle at Rhyl is therefore about £278. Testing here therefore saves about £70 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Rhyl was 6 weeks in July 2026, 5.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.76 expected retakes add only around 4.5 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 1,361 standard slots inside the booking window here and 21.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,185 passes from 2,090 first tests at Rhyl, 56.7% against 56.9% for all attempts. 60 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.87% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Rhyl has risen by 4.4 points, from 52.5% to 56.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,456 to 4,011 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £42 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 58.4% and female candidates at 55.5%, a gap of 2.9 points across 1,980 and 2,031 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.3% of the workload and passed at 50.5%, 6.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.7% in February 2026 to 67.1% in July 2025, a 18.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Bangor runs 5.3 points higher at 62.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £43 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.