Brecon test centre: 58.7% pass rate, £263 to get through it.

Brecon is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,490 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 875 were passes, giving 58.7%. 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 55th of 308 nationally and 5th of 21 in Wales.

That is 8.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.3 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 58.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.70 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Brecon pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.70 times, or £106. Add 0.70 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £157. The test cycle at Brecon is therefore about £263. Testing here therefore saves about £85 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 Brecon was 6.9 weeks in July 2026, 5.0 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.70 expected retakes add only around 4.9 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 833 standard slots inside the booking window here and 49.1% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 808 first attempts at Brecon, 487 passed, a rate of 60.3%, which is 1.6 points above the all-attempts figure. 28 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.47% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Brecon has fallen by 1.4 points, from 60.1% to 58.7%. Volume has been steady, 1,705 tests then against 1,490 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £11 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 63.1% and female candidates at 53.7%, a gap of 9.4 points across 792 and 698 tests. Automatic tests made up 14.4% of the workload and passed at 50.0%, 8.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 52.5% in August 2025 to 69.0% in February 2026, a 16.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Pwllheli runs 9.4 points higher at 68.1%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £67 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.