Hexham test centre: 53.0% pass rate, £297 to get through it.

Hexham is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,388 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 735 were passes, giving 53.0%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 134th of 308 nationally and 4th of 11 in North East.

That lands within 2.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 4.5 points above the 48.4% North East average, which makes Hexham an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 53.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.89 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Hexham pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.89 times, or £117. Add 0.89 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 £180. The test cycle at Hexham is therefore about £297. Testing here therefore saves about £30 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Hexham costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 16.9 weeks in July 2026, 5.0 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.89 expected retakes that is about 15 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 538 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 725 first attempts at Hexham, 399 passed, a rate of 55.0%, which is 2.1 points above the all-attempts figure. 17 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.34% 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 Hexham has fallen by 9.2 points, from 62.1% to 53.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 942 to 1,388 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £74 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Hexham, 53.1% against 52.8%. Automatic tests made up 26.2% of the workload and passed at 37.2%, 15.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.2% in June 2025 to 60.9% in April 2025, a 17.7-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 Hexham 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.