Grimsby Coldwater test centre: 42.8% pass rate, £445 to get through it.

5,361 candidates took the car practical test at Grimsby Coldwater during 2025/26 and 2,292 of them passed, a pass rate of 42.8%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 278th of 308 on pass rate, and 29th of 29 inside Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 7.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 7.7 points below the 50.5% average for Yorkshire and The Humber. 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 42.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.34 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Grimsby Coldwater pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.34 times, or £145. Add 1.34 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Yorkshire & Humber rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £300. The test cycle at Grimsby Coldwater is therefore about £445. Testing here therefore costs about £97 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.

Waiting time at Grimsby Coldwater ran to a median 7.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.0 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.34 expected retakes that is roughly 10.6 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,585 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,036 passes from 2,403 first tests at Grimsby Coldwater, 43.1% against 42.8% for all attempts. 46 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.91% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Grimsby Coldwater has risen by 1.8 points, from 41.0% to 42.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,408 to 5,361 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £29 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 42.0% and female candidates at 43.8%, a gap of 1.8 points across 3,042 and 2,319 tests. Automatic tests made up 24.5% of the workload and passed at 35.9%, 6.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 36.8% in July 2025 to 49.2% in May 2025, a 12.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Yorkshire and The Humber, Steeton runs 10.0 points higher at 52.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £127 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.