Llanelli test centre: 51.0% pass rate, £337 to get through it.

Llanelli is a mid-sized centre, putting 4,380 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 2,233 passed, so the centre finished the year on 51.0% and 181st of 308 nationally, 15th of 21 within Wales.

That lands within 0.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.4 points below the 52.4% Wales average, which makes Llanelli 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 Llanelli pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.96 times, or £122. Add 0.96 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £215. The test cycle at Llanelli is therefore about £337. That is within £11 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Llanelli is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Llanelli was 5.4 weeks in July 2026, 6.5 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.96 expected retakes add only around 5.2 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 1,512 standard slots inside the booking window here and 67.1% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 2,101 first attempts at Llanelli, 1,100 passed, a rate of 52.4%, which is 1.4 points above the all-attempts figure. 34 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.62% 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.

The pass rate at Llanelli has held flat since 2021/22, moving from 50.8% to 51.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,235 to 4,380 tests a year. A stable rate is the useful kind for planning, because it means this year's figure is a fair guide to next year's odds.

Male candidates passed at 48.9% and female candidates at 53.5%, a gap of 4.6 points across 2,397 and 1,983 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.0% of the workload and passed at 43.2%, 7.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.4% in March 2026 to 57.0% in October 2025, a 11.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Bangor runs 11.3 points higher at 62.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £101 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.