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

Carlisle is a mid-sized centre, putting 3,518 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 2,065 passed, so the centre finished the year on 58.7% and 57th of 308 nationally, 5th of 31 within North West.

That is 8.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 9.7 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 58.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.70 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Carlisle 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 North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £158. The test cycle at Carlisle 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.

Waiting time at Carlisle ran to a median 8.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 3.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.70 expected retakes that is roughly 5.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 994 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.7% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 1,866 first attempts at Carlisle, 1,118 passed, a rate of 59.9%, which is 1.2 points above the all-attempts figure. 103 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.52% 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 Carlisle has risen by 1.0 points, from 57.7% to 58.7%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 4,335 to 3,518 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £9 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Carlisle, 58.8% against 58.5%. Automatic tests made up 16.6% of the workload and passed at 48.9%, 9.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.3% in February 2026 to 65.4% in August 2025, a 14.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North West, Kendal (Oxenholme Road) runs 6.4 points higher at 65.1%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £48 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.