Heysham test centre: 59.2% pass rate, £259 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Heysham conducted 3,692 car practical tests and issued 2,187 passes. The resulting 59.2% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 50th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 4th of 31 in North West.

That is 9.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 10.2 points above the 49.0% North West 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 59.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.69 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Heysham pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.69 times, or £105. Add 0.69 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £154. The test cycle at Heysham is therefore about £259. Testing here therefore saves about £89 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Heysham. DVSA recorded a median wait of 18.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 6.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.69 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 12.5 extra weeks of waiting, close to 3 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 1,516 standard slots inside the booking window here and 23.9% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 2,082 first attempts at Heysham, 1,289 passed, a rate of 61.9%, which is 2.7 points above the all-attempts figure. 148 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 7.11% 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 Heysham has risen by 7.8 points, from 51.5% to 59.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,685 to 3,692 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £73 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Heysham, 59.2% against 59.3%. Automatic tests made up 15.1% of the workload and passed at 48.7%, 10.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.5% in May 2025 to 68.3% in December 2025, a 18.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North West runs more than five points ahead of Heysham 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.