Wood Green (London) test centre: 46.8% pass rate, £474 to get through it.

11,379 candidates took the car practical test at Wood Green (London) during 2025/26 and 5,326 of them passed, a pass rate of 46.8%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 239th of 308 on pass rate, and 17th of 26 inside London.

That is 3.2 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 2.0 points below the 48.8% average for London. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 46.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.14 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Wood Green (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.14 times, or £132. Add 1.14 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the London rate of £43 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £342. The test cycle at Wood Green (London) is therefore about £474. Testing here therefore costs about £49 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

A fail at Wood Green (London) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 12.6 weeks in July 2026, 0.7 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.14 expected retakes that is about 14.3 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 3,246 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,624 passes from 5,584 first tests at Wood Green (London), 47.0% against 46.8% for all attempts. 107 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.92% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Wood Green (London) has risen by 0.9 points, from 45.9% to 46.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 8,633 to 11,379 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £16 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.6% and female candidates at 44.1%, a gap of 4.5 points across 6,797 and 4,582 tests. Automatic tests accounted for 44.0% of the 11,379 tests and passed at 45.8%, close enough to the overall rate that gearbox choice is a comfort decision here, not a pass-rate one. Month to month the rate ran from 44.4% in June 2025 to 49.5% in July 2025, a 5.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in London, Tolworth (London) runs 6.8 points higher at 53.6%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £98 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.