Barrow In Furness test centre: 69.6% pass rate, £187 to get through it.

Barrow In Furness is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,699 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 1,183 were passes, giving 69.6%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 10th of 308 nationally and 1st of 31 in North West.

That is 19.6 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 20.6 points above the 49.0% North West 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 69.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.44 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Barrow In Furness pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.44 times, or £89. Add 0.44 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £98. The test cycle at Barrow In Furness is therefore about £187. Testing here therefore saves about £161 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Barrow In Furness was 4.4 weeks in July 2026, 7.5 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.44 expected retakes add only around 1.9 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 834 standard slots inside the booking window here and 35.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 706 passes from 1,008 first tests at Barrow In Furness, 70.0% against 69.6% for all attempts. 100 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 9.92% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Barrow In Furness has risen by 10.9 points, from 58.7% to 69.6%. Volume has been steady, 1,958 tests then against 1,699 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £76 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 71.2% and female candidates at 68.1%, a gap of 3.1 points across 860 and 839 tests. Automatic tests made up 16.7% of the workload and passed at 58.1%, 11.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 65.5% in February 2026 to 77.5% in May 2025, a 12.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North West runs more than five points ahead of Barrow In Furness 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.