Cardiff (Llanishen) test centre: 46.5% pass rate, £390 to get through it.

Cardiff (Llanishen) is one of the busiest centres in Great Britain, putting 16,401 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 7,634 passed, so the centre finished the year on 46.5% and 244th of 308 nationally, 20th of 21 within Wales.

That is 3.5 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 5.8 points below the 52.4% average for Wales. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 46.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.15 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Cardiff (Llanishen) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.15 times, or £133. Add 1.15 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £257. The test cycle at Cardiff (Llanishen) is therefore about £390. Testing here therefore costs about £42 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

Waiting time at Cardiff (Llanishen) ran to a median 11.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.15 expected retakes that is roughly 12.7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 5,273 standard slots inside the booking window here and 28.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 7,552 first attempts at Cardiff (Llanishen), 3,652 passed, a rate of 48.4%, which is 1.8 points above the all-attempts figure. 223 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.95% 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 Cardiff (Llanishen) has fallen by 10.5 points, from 57.0% to 46.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 10,305 to 16,401 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £113 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.1% and female candidates at 44.7%, a gap of 3.4 points across 9,056 and 7,345 tests. Automatic tests made up 27.8% of the workload and passed at 39.2%, 7.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 42.6% in January 2026 to 53.1% in May 2025, a 10.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Llantrisant runs 7.5 points higher at 54.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £85 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.