Gillingham test centre: 56.4% pass rate, £316 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Gillingham conducted 14,886 car practical tests and issued 8,389 passes. The resulting 56.4% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 87th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 11th of 32 in South East.

That is 6.3 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 3.2 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 56.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.77 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Gillingham pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.77 times, or £110. Add 0.77 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 £206. The test cycle at Gillingham is therefore about £316. Testing here therefore saves about £74 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Gillingham ran to a median 9.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 2.0 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.77 expected retakes that is roughly 7.7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 4,613 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 8,007 first attempts at Gillingham, 4,615 passed, a rate of 57.6%, which is 1.3 points above the all-attempts figure. 268 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.35% 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 Gillingham has fallen by 2.5 points, from 58.8% to 56.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,782 to 14,886 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £24 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.1% and female candidates at 55.4%, a gap of 1.7 points across 8,270 and 6,616 tests. Automatic tests made up 40.2% of the workload and passed at 51.9%, 4.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 53.8% in July 2025 to 60.6% in April 2025, a 6.8-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 Gillingham 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.