Upton test centre: 52.6% pass rate, £320 to get through it.

10,772 candidates took the car practical test at Upton during 2025/26 and 5,667 of them passed, a pass rate of 52.6%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 143rd of 308 on pass rate, and 13th of 31 inside North West.

That lands within 2.6 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 3.6 points above the 49.0% North West average, which makes Upton an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.90 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Upton pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.90 times, or £118. Add 0.90 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £202. The test cycle at Upton is therefore about £320. Testing here therefore saves about £28 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Upton costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 12.1 weeks in July 2026, 0.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.90 expected retakes that is about 10.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 3,549 standard slots inside the booking window here and 10.7% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 5,194 first attempts at Upton, 2,849 passed, a rate of 54.9%, which is 2.2 points above the all-attempts figure. 125 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.41% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Upton has risen by 2.9 points, from 49.7% to 52.6%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,647 to 10,772 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £32 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Upton, 52.5% against 52.7%. Automatic tests made up 30.1% of the workload and passed at 47.5%, 5.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.3% in March 2026 to 57.6% in May 2025, a 8.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North West runs more than five points ahead of Upton 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.