Swindon test centre: 51.1% pass rate, £363 to get through it.

Swindon is a high-volume centre, putting 12,857 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 6,567 passed, so the centre finished the year on 51.1% and 178th of 308 nationally, 12th of 21 within South West.

That lands within 1.1 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.7 points below the 51.7% South West average, which makes Swindon an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.96 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Swindon pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.96 times, or £121. Add 0.96 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South West rate of £36 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £241. The test cycle at Swindon is therefore about £363. That is within £13 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Swindon is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Waiting time at Swindon ran to a median 11.7 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.2 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.96 expected retakes that is roughly 11.2 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 5,653 standard slots inside the booking window here and 9.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 3,202 passes from 6,307 first tests at Swindon, 50.8% against 51.1% for all attempts. 338 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.36% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Swindon has risen by 4.5 points, from 46.6% to 51.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 8,438 to 12,857 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £59 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 51.6% and female candidates at 50.5%, a gap of 1.1 points across 6,861 and 5,996 tests. Automatic tests made up 27.3% of the workload and passed at 45.4%, 5.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 46.3% in June 2025 to 54.6% in November 2025, a 8.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Chippenham runs 5.4 points higher at 56.4%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £58 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.