Barnet (London) test centre: 49.9% pass rate, £427 to get through it.

Barnet (London) is a high-volume centre, putting 12,397 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 6,182 passed, so the centre finished the year on 49.9% and 199th of 308 nationally, 13th of 26 within London.

That lands within 0.2 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.1 points above the 48.8% London average, which makes Barnet (London) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 49.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.01 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Barnet (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.01 times, or £124. Add 1.01 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the London rate of £43 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £303. The test cycle at Barnet (London) is therefore about £427. That is within £2 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Barnet (London) is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

The queue is the expensive part at Barnet (London). DVSA recorded a median wait of 21.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 9.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.01 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 21.2 extra weeks of waiting, close to 5 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 3,698 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.4% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 6,805 candidates sat their first test at Barnet (London) and 3,320 passed, 48.8%, which is 1.1 points below the all-attempts rate. 153 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.25% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Barnet (London) has risen by 3.9 points, from 46.0% to 49.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,926 to 12,397 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £61 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 51.4% and female candidates at 47.7%, a gap of 3.7 points across 7,331 and 5,066 tests. Automatic tests accounted for 42.4% of the 12,397 tests and passed at 48.1%, close enough to the overall rate that gearbox choice is a comfort decision here, not a pass-rate one. Month to month the rate ran from 47.5% in August 2025 to 52.9% in February 2026, a 5.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in London runs more than five points ahead of Barnet (London) 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.