Kettering test centre: 49.1% pass rate, £373 to get through it.

Kettering is a high-volume centre, putting 11,876 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 5,829 passed, so the centre finished the year on 49.1% and 208th of 308 nationally, 16th of 20 within East Midlands.

That lands within 0.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.7 points below the 50.8% East Midlands average, which makes Kettering an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 49.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.04 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Kettering pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.04 times, or £126. Add 1.04 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £247. The test cycle at Kettering is therefore about £373. That is within £11 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Kettering is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Waiting time at Kettering ran to a median 7.3 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.6 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.04 expected retakes that is roughly 7.6 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,013 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.4% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 5,647 first attempts at Kettering, 2,831 passed, a rate of 50.1%, which is 1.1 points above the all-attempts figure. 120 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.13% 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 Kettering has risen by 8.5 points, from 40.5% to 49.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 8,447 to 11,876 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £129 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 49.6% and female candidates at 48.5%, a gap of 1.1 points across 6,603 and 5,273 tests. Automatic tests made up 26.4% of the workload and passed at 41.0%, 8.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 44.6% in November 2025 to 54.5% in July 2025, a 9.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Ashfield runs 8.2 points higher at 57.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £88 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.