Stevenage test centre: 55.3% pass rate, £316 to get through it.

4,622 candidates took the car practical test at Stevenage during 2025/26 and 2,557 of them passed, a pass rate of 55.3%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 104th of 308 on pass rate, and 5th of 24 inside East of England.

That is 5.3 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 4.0 points above the 51.4% East of England 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 55.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.81 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Stevenage pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.81 times, or £112. Add 0.81 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East of England rate of £36 an hour (the closest published band on our regional lesson table), and the extra lessons come to £204. The test cycle at Stevenage is therefore about £316. Testing here therefore saves about £60 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 Stevenage was 6.7 weeks in July 2026, 5.2 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.81 expected retakes add only around 5.4 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 1,879 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,326 passes from 2,375 first tests at Stevenage, 55.8% against 55.3% for all attempts. 52 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.19% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Stevenage has risen by 8.3 points, from 47.1% to 55.3%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 5,589 to 4,622 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £99 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 55.9% and female candidates at 54.6%, a gap of 1.3 points across 2,548 and 2,074 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.2% of the workload and passed at 48.5%, 6.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.5% in August 2025 to 64.1% in October 2025, a 15.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East of England runs more than five points ahead of Stevenage 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.