Whitby test centre: 56.7% pass rate, £280 to get through it.

Whitby is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 557 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 316 were passes, giving 56.7%. 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 81st of 308 nationally and 7th of 29 in Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 6.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.3 points above the 50.5% Yorkshire and The Humber 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 56.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.76 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Whitby pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.76 times, or £109. Add 0.76 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Yorkshire & Humber rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £171. The test cycle at Whitby is therefore about £280. Testing here therefore saves about £68 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 Whitby. DVSA recorded a median wait of 19 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 7.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.76 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 14.5 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 220 standard slots inside the booking window here and 7.3% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 192 passes from 343 first tests at Whitby, 56.0% against 56.7% for all attempts. 4 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.17% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Whitby has risen by 0.6 points, from 56.1% to 56.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 260 to 557 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £5 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 60.7% and female candidates at 52.3%, a gap of 8.4 points across 295 and 262 tests. Automatic tests made up 6.6% of the workload and passed at 48.6%, 8.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.1% in July 2025 to 70.2% in April 2025, a 27.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Yorkshire and The Humber, Malton runs 7.5 points higher at 64.3%. 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.