Durham test centre: 53.2% pass rate, £295 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Durham conducted 9,451 car practical tests and issued 5,027 passes. The resulting 53.2% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 131st of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 3rd of 11 in North East.

That is 3.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 4.8 points above the 48.4% North East 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 53.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.88 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Durham pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.88 times, or £117. Add 0.88 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North East rate of £29 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £179. The test cycle at Durham is therefore about £295. Testing here therefore saves about £32 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Durham costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.7 weeks in July 2026, 3.8 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.88 expected retakes that is about 13.8 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 3,275 standard slots inside the booking window here and 15.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,867 first attempts at Durham, 2,669 passed, a rate of 54.8%, which is 1.6 points above the all-attempts figure. 166 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.41% 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 Durham has fallen by 9.3 points, from 62.5% to 53.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,795 to 9,451 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £74 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 53.7% and female candidates at 52.6%, a gap of 1.1 points across 4,878 and 4,573 tests. Automatic tests made up 17.9% of the workload and passed at 47.8%, 5.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 47.5% in January 2026 to 61.0% in June 2025, a 13.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North East runs more than five points ahead of Durham 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.