Hartlepool test centre: 51.0% pass rate, £316 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Hartlepool conducted 5,847 car practical tests and issued 2,984 passes. The resulting 51.0% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 179th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 6th of 11 in North East.

That lands within 1.0 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.6 points above the 48.4% North East average, which makes Hartlepool an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.96 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Hartlepool pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.96 times, or £121. Add 0.96 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 £195. The test cycle at Hartlepool is therefore about £316. That is within £11 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Hartlepool is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

A fail at Hartlepool costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.4 weeks in July 2026, 1.5 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.96 expected retakes that is about 12.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,756 standard slots inside the booking window here and 26.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,478 passes from 2,847 first tests at Hartlepool, 51.9% against 51.0% for all attempts. 108 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.79% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Hartlepool has fallen by 6.8 points, from 57.9% to 51.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,395 to 5,847 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £61 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Hartlepool, 51.0% against 51.1%. Automatic tests made up 21.1% of the workload and passed at 45.3%, 5.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.8% in January 2026 to 58.5% in April 2025, a 12.7-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 Hartlepool 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.