Melton Mowbray test centre: 69.7% pass rate, £193 to get through it.

Melton Mowbray is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,984 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 1,382 were passes, giving 69.7%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 9th of 308 nationally and 1st of 20 in East Midlands.

That is 19.6 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 18.9 points above the 50.8% East Midlands 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 69.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.44 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Melton Mowbray pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.44 times, or £89. Add 0.44 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 £104. The test cycle at Melton Mowbray is therefore about £193. Testing here therefore saves about £169 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Melton Mowbray. DVSA recorded a median wait of 23.3 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.4 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.44 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 10.1 extra weeks of waiting, close to 2 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 1,023 standard slots inside the booking window here and 1.4% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 1,215 first attempts at Melton Mowbray, 865 passed, a rate of 71.2%, which is 1.5 points above the all-attempts figure. 120 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 9.88% 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 Melton Mowbray has risen by 6.9 points, from 62.7% to 69.7%. Volume has been steady, 1,873 tests then against 1,984 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £48 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 71.2% and female candidates at 68.1%, a gap of 3.2 points across 1,001 and 983 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.3% of the workload and passed at 62.6%, 7.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 65.1% in April 2025 to 77.4% in October 2025, a 12.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Melton Mowbray 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.