Chorley test centre: 52.8% pass rate, £317 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Chorley conducted 5,415 car practical tests and issued 2,860 passes. The resulting 52.8% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 138th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 12th of 31 in North West.

That lands within 2.8 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 3.8 points above the 49.0% North West average, which makes Chorley an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.89 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Chorley pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.89 times, or £117. Add 0.89 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 £200. The test cycle at Chorley is therefore about £317. Testing here therefore saves about £31 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Chorley ran to a median 12 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.89 expected retakes that is roughly 10.7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,967 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.1% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 2,663 first attempts at Chorley, 1,437 passed, a rate of 54.0%, which is 1.1 points above the all-attempts figure. 69 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.59% 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 Chorley has fallen by 4.5 points, from 57.3% to 52.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,943 to 5,415 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £42 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Chorley, 52.5% against 53.2%. Automatic tests made up 19.3% of the workload and passed at 46.2%, 6.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 47.9% in April 2025 to 59.2% in February 2026, a 11.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North West runs more than five points ahead of Chorley 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.