Southall (London) test centre: 44.8% pass rate, £509 to get through it.

8,543 candidates took the car practical test at Southall (London) during 2025/26 and 3,827 of them passed, a pass rate of 44.8%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 265th of 308 on pass rate, and 20th of 26 inside London.

That is 5.2 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 4.0 points below the 48.8% average for London. 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 44.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.23 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Southall (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.23 times, or £138. Add 1.23 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the London rate of £43 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £371. The test cycle at Southall (London) is therefore about £509. Testing here therefore costs about £84 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.

A fail at Southall (London) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 12.3 weeks in July 2026, 0.4 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.23 expected retakes that is about 15.2 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,782 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.9% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 4,175 candidates sat their first test at Southall (London) and 1,746 passed, 41.8%, which is 3.0 points below the all-attempts rate. 110 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.63% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Southall (London) has risen by 1.9 points, from 43.0% to 44.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,255 to 8,543 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £35 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 46.9% and female candidates at 40.8%, a gap of 6.2 points across 5,613 and 2,930 tests. Automatic tests made up 37.2% of the workload and passed at 41.7%, 3.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 39.3% in March 2026 to 47.8% in June 2025, a 8.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in London, Enfield (Innova Business Park) runs 9.1 points higher at 53.9%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £137 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.