Maidstone test centre: 60.2% pass rate, £279 to get through it.

Maidstone is a high-volume centre, putting 8,053 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 4,850 passed, so the centre finished the year on 60.2% and 43rd of 308 nationally, 4th of 32 within South East.

That is 10.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 7.1 points above the 53.2% South East 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 60.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.66 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Maidstone pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.66 times, or £103. Add 0.66 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South East rate of £38 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £176. The test cycle at Maidstone is therefore about £279. Testing here therefore saves about £111 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Maidstone ran to a median 10 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.9 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.66 expected retakes that is roughly 6.6 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,895 standard slots inside the booking window here and 8.1% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,343 first attempts at Maidstone, 2,675 passed, a rate of 61.6%, which is 1.4 points above the all-attempts figure. 164 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 Maidstone has risen by 7.0 points, from 53.2% to 60.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,993 to 8,053 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £72 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 60.9% and female candidates at 59.3%, a gap of 1.6 points across 4,582 and 3,471 tests. Automatic tests made up 32.3% of the workload and passed at 53.6%, 6.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 57.0% in June 2025 to 63.7% in May 2025, a 6.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South East runs more than five points ahead of Maidstone 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.