Aylesbury test centre: 49.3% pass rate, £400 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Aylesbury conducted 5,255 car practical tests and issued 2,589 passes. The resulting 49.3% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 205th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 26th of 32 in South East.

That lands within 0.8 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 3.9 points below the 53.2% South East average, which makes Aylesbury an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 49.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.03 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Aylesbury pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.03 times, or £126. Add 1.03 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 £274. The test cycle at Aylesbury is therefore about £400. That is within £10 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Aylesbury is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Aylesbury was 5 weeks in July 2026, 6.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.03 expected retakes add only around 5.1 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 1,347 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.5% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,587 candidates sat their first test at Aylesbury and 1,246 passed, 48.2%, which is 1.1 points below the all-attempts rate. 39 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.51% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Aylesbury has risen by 1.4 points, from 47.8% to 49.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,939 to 5,255 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £20 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 49.9% and female candidates at 48.5%, a gap of 1.4 points across 2,842 and 2,413 tests. Automatic tests made up 30.6% of the workload and passed at 46.2%, 3.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.5% in February 2026 to 51.4% in July 2025, a 5.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South East, Basingstoke runs 7.5 points higher at 56.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £88 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.