Bridlington test centre: 55.5% pass rate, £291 to get through it.

3,027 candidates took the car practical test at Bridlington during 2025/26 and 1,681 of them passed, a pass rate of 55.5%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 99th of 308 on pass rate, and 9th of 29 inside Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 5.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 5.0 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 55.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.80 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bridlington pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.80 times, or £112. Add 0.80 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 £179. The test cycle at Bridlington is therefore about £291. Testing here therefore saves about £57 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Bridlington 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 0.80 expected retakes that is roughly 9.5 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 849 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.4% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 890 passes from 1,602 first tests at Bridlington, 55.6% against 55.5% for all attempts. 37 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.31% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bridlington has fallen by 4.5 points, from 60.0% to 55.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 1,699 to 3,027 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £39 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 59.3% and female candidates at 51.8%, a gap of 7.6 points across 1,514 and 1,513 tests. Automatic tests made up 13.9% of the workload and passed at 44.0%, 11.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.2% in July 2025 to 59.9% in February 2026, a 8.6-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 Bridlington 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.