Bangor test centre: 62.2% pass rate, £236 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Bangor conducted 4,032 car practical tests and issued 2,509 passes. The resulting 62.2% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 34th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 3rd of 21 in Wales.

That is 12.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 9.8 points above the 52.4% Wales 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 62.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.61 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bangor pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.61 times, or £100. Add 0.61 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £136. The test cycle at Bangor is therefore about £236. Testing here therefore saves about £112 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Bangor ran to a median 11.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.0 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.61 expected retakes that is roughly 7.2 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,005 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,449 passes from 2,311 first tests at Bangor, 62.7% against 62.2% for all attempts. 99 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.28% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bangor has risen by 7.9 points, from 54.3% to 62.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,135 to 4,032 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £67 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 62.7% and female candidates at 61.7%, a gap of 1.0 points across 2,121 and 1,911 tests. Automatic tests made up 13.3% of the workload and passed at 49.9%, 12.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 58.4% in February 2026 to 68.1% in May 2025, a 9.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Wales runs more than five points ahead of Bangor 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.