Scunthorpe test centre: 45.4% pass rate, £405 to get through it.

6,103 candidates took the car practical test at Scunthorpe during 2025/26 and 2,773 of them passed, a pass rate of 45.4%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 260th of 308 on pass rate, and 24th of 29 inside Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 4.6 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 5.0 points below the 50.5% average for Yorkshire and The Humber. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 45.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.20 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Scunthorpe pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.20 times, or £136. Add 1.20 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Yorkshire & Humber rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £269. The test cycle at Scunthorpe is therefore about £405. Testing here therefore costs about £57 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Scunthorpe was 4 weeks in July 2026, 7.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.20 expected retakes add only around 4.8 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 1,373 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.6% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,950 candidates sat their first test at Scunthorpe and 1,299 passed, 44.0%, which is 1.4 points below the all-attempts rate. 62 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.10% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Scunthorpe has fallen by 1.7 points, from 47.2% to 45.4%. Volume has been steady, 5,820 tests then against 6,103 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £23 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 46.0% and female candidates at 44.8%, a gap of 1.3 points across 3,223 and 2,880 tests. Automatic tests made up 20.8% of the workload and passed at 37.1%, 8.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 40.8% in October 2025 to 49.4% in February 2026, a 8.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Yorkshire and The Humber, Leeds (Colton Mill) runs 6.4 points higher at 51.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £77 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.