Llantrisant test centre: 54.0% pass rate, £306 to get through it.

9,909 candidates took the car practical test at Llantrisant during 2025/26 and 5,352 of them passed, a pass rate of 54.0%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 114th of 308 on pass rate, and 11th of 21 inside Wales.

That is 4.0 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 1.6 points above the 52.4% Wales 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 54.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.85 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Llantrisant pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.85 times, or £115. Add 0.85 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £191. The test cycle at Llantrisant is therefore about £306. Testing here therefore saves about £42 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Llantrisant ran to a median 8.6 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 3.3 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.85 expected retakes that is roughly 7.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,450 standard slots inside the booking window here and 35.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,687 first attempts at Llantrisant, 2,602 passed, a rate of 55.5%, which is 1.5 points above the all-attempts figure. 177 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.78% 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 Llantrisant has fallen by 8.5 points, from 62.5% to 54.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,392 to 9,909 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £72 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 52.5% and female candidates at 56.2%, a gap of 3.8 points across 5,805 and 4,104 tests. Automatic tests made up 22.1% of the workload and passed at 45.0%, 9.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.2% in July 2025 to 57.3% in August 2025, a 6.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Abergavenny runs 10.2 points higher at 64.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £84 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.