Bradford (Heaton) test centre: 56.1% pass rate, £285 to get through it.

Bradford (Heaton) is a high-volume centre, putting 8,354 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 4,690 passed, so the centre finished the year on 56.1% and 90th of 308 nationally, 8th of 29 within Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 6.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 5.7 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 56.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.78 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bradford (Heaton) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.78 times, or £110. Add 0.78 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 £175. The test cycle at Bradford (Heaton) is therefore about £285. Testing here therefore saves about £63 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Bradford (Heaton) 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 0.78 expected retakes that is about 11.8 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 4,025 standard slots inside the booking window here and 28.5% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 3,882 candidates sat their first test at Bradford (Heaton) and 2,109 passed, 54.3%, which is 1.8 points below the all-attempts rate. 129 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.32% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bradford (Heaton) has risen by 5.8 points, from 50.3% to 56.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,588 to 8,354 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £59 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.0% and female candidates at 55.1%, a gap of 1.9 points across 4,426 and 3,928 tests. Automatic tests accounted for 32.5% of the 8,354 tests and passed at 55.0%, 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 49.5% in November 2025 to 60.1% in July 2025, a 10.6-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 Bradford (Heaton) 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.