Winchester test centre: 52.2% pass rate, £362 to get through it.

Winchester is a mid-sized centre, putting 4,602 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 2,404 passed, so the centre finished the year on 52.2% and 148th of 308 nationally, 20th of 32 within South East.

That lands within 2.2 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.9 points below the 53.2% South East average, which makes Winchester an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.91 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Winchester pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.91 times, or £119. Add 0.91 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South East rate of £38 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £243. The test cycle at Winchester is therefore about £362. 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.

Waiting time at Winchester 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 0.91 expected retakes that is roughly 6.5 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,718 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.3% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,269 candidates sat their first test at Winchester and 1,135 passed, 50.0%, which is 2.2 points below the all-attempts rate. 107 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.72% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Winchester has fallen by 4.3 points, from 56.5% to 52.2%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 5,793 to 4,602 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £47 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 53.4% and female candidates at 51.0%, a gap of 2.5 points across 2,394 and 2,208 tests. Automatic tests made up 25.0% of the workload and passed at 45.3%, 6.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 47.9% in December 2025 to 60.3% in March 2026, a 12.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South East runs more than five points ahead of Winchester 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.