Loughborough test centre: 42.4% pass rate, £470 to get through it.

Loughborough is a mid-sized centre, putting 5,502 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 2,330 passed, so the centre finished the year on 42.4% and 282nd of 308 nationally, 19th of 20 within East Midlands.

That is 7.7 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 8.4 points below the 50.8% average for East Midlands. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 42.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.36 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Loughborough pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.36 times, or £146. Add 1.36 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 £324. The test cycle at Loughborough is therefore about £470. Testing here therefore costs about £108 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

The queue is the expensive part at Loughborough. DVSA recorded a median wait of 23 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.36 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 31.3 extra weeks of waiting, close to 7 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 645 standard slots inside the booking window here and 7.6% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,098 passes from 2,577 first tests at Loughborough, 42.6% against 42.4% for all attempts. 77 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.99% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Loughborough has fallen by 4.8 points, from 47.1% to 42.4%. Volume has been steady, 4,984 tests then against 5,502 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £72 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Loughborough, 42.4% against 42.3%. Automatic tests made up 19.8% of the workload and passed at 33.2%, 9.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 38.5% in June 2025 to 50.5% in October 2025, a 12.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Worksop runs 12.8 points higher at 55.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £165 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.