York test centre: 54.4% pass rate, £301 to get through it.

York is a high-volume centre, putting 9,416 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 5,125 passed, so the centre finished the year on 54.4% and 109th of 308 nationally, 10th of 29 within Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 4.4 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 4.0 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 54.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.84 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at York pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.84 times, or £114. Add 0.84 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 £188. The test cycle at York is therefore about £301. Testing here therefore saves about £47 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at York costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.1 weeks in July 2026, 3.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.84 expected retakes that is about 12.6 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 3,123 standard slots inside the booking window here and 16.3% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,553 passes from 4,665 first tests at York, 54.7% against 54.4% for all attempts. 155 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.32% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at York has risen by 3.8 points, from 50.6% to 54.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,181 to 9,416 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £40 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at York, 54.5% against 54.3%. Automatic tests made up 17.3% of the workload and passed at 49.9%, 4.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.9% in June 2025 to 58.5% in March 2026, a 8.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Yorkshire and The Humber runs more than five points ahead of York 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.