Goodmayes (London) test centre: 43.7% pass rate, £530 to get through it.

Goodmayes (London) is one of the busiest centres in Great Britain, putting 21,374 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 9,338 passed, so the centre finished the year on 43.7% and 273rd of 308 nationally, 22nd of 26 within London.

That is 6.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 5.1 points below the 48.8% average for London. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 43.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.29 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Goodmayes (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.29 times, or £142. Add 1.29 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the London rate of £43 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £388. The test cycle at Goodmayes (London) is therefore about £530. Testing here therefore costs about £105 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

The queue is the expensive part at Goodmayes (London). DVSA recorded a median wait of 21 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 9.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.29 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 27.1 extra weeks of waiting, close to 6 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 5,425 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.1% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 9,983 candidates sat their first test at Goodmayes (London) and 4,053 passed, 40.6%, which is 3.1 points below the all-attempts rate. 167 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.67% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Goodmayes (London) has risen by 2.3 points, from 41.4% to 43.7%. Volume has been steady, 23,213 tests then against 21,374 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £47 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 47.2% and female candidates at 39.1%, a gap of 8.1 points across 12,022 and 9,352 tests. Automatic tests made up 54.1% of the workload and passed at 41.5%, 2.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 41.4% in March 2026 to 46.7% in July 2025, a 5.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in London, Morden (London) runs 7.3 points higher at 51.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £119 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.