Worksop test centre: 55.2% pass rate, £306 to get through it.

5,975 candidates took the car practical test at Worksop during 2025/26 and 3,296 of them passed, a pass rate of 55.2%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 106th of 308 on pass rate, and 8th of 20 inside East Midlands.

That is 5.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 4.4 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 55.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.81 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Worksop pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.81 times, or £112. Add 0.81 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 £193. The test cycle at Worksop is therefore about £306. Testing here therefore saves about £56 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Worksop ran to a median 11 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.9 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.81 expected retakes that is roughly 8.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,946 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.8% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,301 first attempts at Worksop, 1,854 passed, a rate of 56.2%, which is 1.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 127 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.85% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Worksop has fallen by 4.8 points, from 60.0% to 55.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,554 to 5,975 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £44 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.1% and female candidates at 53.1%, a gap of 4.0 points across 3,118 and 2,857 tests. Automatic tests made up 20.0% of the workload and passed at 48.0%, 7.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.3% in March 2026 to 58.8% in August 2025, a 7.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Worksop 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.