Farnborough test centre: 59.7% pass rate, £283 to get through it.

10,482 candidates took the car practical test at Farnborough during 2025/26 and 6,258 of them passed, a pass rate of 59.7%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 47th of 308 on pass rate, and 6th of 32 inside South East.

That is 9.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.5 points above the 53.2% South 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 59.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.68 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Farnborough pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.68 times, or £104. Add 0.68 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South East rate of £38 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £180. The test cycle at Farnborough is therefore about £283. Testing here therefore saves about £107 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Farnborough costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 16 weeks in July 2026, 4.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.68 expected retakes that is about 10.8 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 4,742 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 3,565 passes from 5,929 first tests at Farnborough, 60.1% against 59.7% for all attempts. 359 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.05% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Farnborough has risen by 2.5 points, from 57.1% to 59.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 8,257 to 10,482 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £25 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 61.7% and female candidates at 57.6%, a gap of 4.1 points across 5,413 and 5,069 tests. Automatic tests made up 27.6% of the workload and passed at 52.2%, 7.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 57.1% in October 2025 to 65.9% in May 2025, a 8.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South East runs more than five points ahead of Farnborough 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.