Weston-super-Mare test centre: 61.0% pass rate, £263 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Weston-super-Mare conducted 4,443 car practical tests and issued 2,711 passes. The resulting 61.0% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 40th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 3rd of 21 in South West.

That is 11.0 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 9.3 points above the 51.7% South West 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 61.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.64 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Weston-super-Mare pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.64 times, or £102. Add 0.64 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 £161. The test cycle at Weston-super-Mare is therefore about £263. Testing here therefore saves about £113 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 Weston-super-Mare was 5 weeks in July 2026, 6.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.64 expected retakes add only around 3.2 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 1,483 standard slots inside the booking window here and 13.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,498 passes from 2,442 first tests at Weston-super-Mare, 61.3% against 61.0% for all attempts. 126 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.16% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Weston-super-Mare has risen by 6.8 points, from 54.3% to 61.0%. Volume has been steady, 5,087 tests then against 4,443 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £64 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 62.4% and female candidates at 59.5%, a gap of 2.9 points across 2,371 and 2,072 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.1% of the workload and passed at 54.8%, 6.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 55.2% in November 2025 to 64.9% in March 2026, a 9.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Dorchester runs 7.9 points higher at 69.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £59 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.