Wellingborough test centre: 60.0% pass rate, £262 to get through it.

Wellingborough is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,450 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 870 were passes, giving 60.0%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 44th of 308 nationally and 2nd of 20 in East Midlands.

That is 10.0 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 9.2 points above the 50.8% East Midlands 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 60.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.67 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Wellingborough pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.67 times, or £103. Add 0.67 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £159. The test cycle at Wellingborough is therefore about £262. Testing here therefore saves about £100 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Wellingborough. DVSA recorded a median wait of 21.4 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 9.5 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.67 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 14.3 extra weeks of waiting, close to 3 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 353 standard slots inside the booking window here and 1.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 467 passes from 786 first tests at Wellingborough, 59.4% against 60.0% for all attempts. 28 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.56% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Wellingborough has fallen by 5.1 points, from 65.1% to 60.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 1,110 to 1,450 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £39 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.5% and female candidates at 62.3%, a gap of 4.8 points across 692 and 758 tests. Automatic tests made up 45.0% of the workload and passed at 57.6%, 2.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 53.2% in September 2025 to 69.8% in June 2025, a 16.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Melton Mowbray runs 9.7 points higher at 69.7%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £69 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.