Tilbury test centre: 50.4% pass rate, £372 to get through it.

5,083 candidates took the car practical test at Tilbury during 2025/26 and 2,560 of them passed, a pass rate of 50.4%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 193rd of 308 on pass rate, and 14th of 24 inside East of England.

That lands within 0.3 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.0 points below the 51.4% East of England average, which makes Tilbury an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 50.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.99 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Tilbury pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.99 times, or £123. Add 0.99 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 £248. The test cycle at Tilbury is therefore about £372. That is within £4 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Tilbury is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Waiting time at Tilbury ran to a median 7.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.99 expected retakes that is roughly 7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,770 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,244 passes from 2,473 first tests at Tilbury, 50.3% against 50.4% for all attempts. 42 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.70% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Tilbury has risen by 5.6 points, from 44.8% to 50.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,717 to 5,083 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £78 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 50.9% and female candidates at 49.7%, a gap of 1.3 points across 2,836 and 2,247 tests. Automatic tests made up 42.0% of the workload and passed at 46.0%, 4.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.7% in April 2025 to 52.5% in February 2026, a 3.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East of England, Letchworth runs 7.1 points higher at 57.5%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £78 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.