Worthing test centre: 59.8% pass rate, £283 to get through it.

8,495 candidates took the car practical test at Worthing during 2025/26 and 5,076 of them passed, a pass rate of 59.8%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 46th of 308 on pass rate, and 5th of 32 inside South East.

That is 9.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.6 points above the 53.2% South East 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 59.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.67 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Worthing pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.67 times, or £104. Add 0.67 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 £179. The test cycle at Worthing is therefore about £283. Testing here therefore saves about £107 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Worthing ran to a median 10.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.67 expected retakes that is roughly 6.8 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,285 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.6% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,600 passes from 4,318 first tests at Worthing, 60.2% against 59.8% for all attempts. 287 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.65% of them.

Since 2010/11 the pass rate at Worthing has risen by 9.1 points, from 50.7% to 59.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,377 to 8,495 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £98 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 60.5% and female candidates at 58.9%, a gap of 1.6 points across 4,635 and 3,860 tests. Automatic tests made up 25.8% of the workload and passed at 54.4%, 5.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 57.2% in September 2025 to 64.2% in December 2025, a 7.0-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 Worthing 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.