Carmarthen test centre: 54.2% pass rate, £304 to get through it.

Carmarthen is a small centre by DVSA standards: 2,746 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 1,488 were passes, giving 54.2%. 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 111th of 308 nationally and 10th of 21 in Wales.

That is 4.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 1.8 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 54.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.85 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Carmarthen pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.85 times, or £114. Add 0.85 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £189. The test cycle at Carmarthen is therefore about £304. Testing here therefore saves about £44 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Carmarthen ran to a median 9.7 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 2.2 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.85 expected retakes that is roughly 8.2 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 831 standard slots inside the booking window here and 35.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 730 passes from 1,350 first tests at Carmarthen, 54.1% against 54.2% for all attempts. 35 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.59% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Carmarthen has fallen by 3.1 points, from 57.3% to 54.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,253 to 2,746 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £28 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Carmarthen, 54.2% against 54.2%. Automatic tests made up 14.5% of the workload and passed at 44.1%, 10.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.1% in September 2025 to 60.0% in February 2026, a 11.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Wales runs more than five points ahead of Carmarthen 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.