Middlesbrough test centre: 47.7% pass rate, £353 to get through it.

8,854 candidates took the car practical test at Middlesbrough during 2025/26 and 4,221 of them passed, a pass rate of 47.7%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 228th of 308 on pass rate, and 9th of 11 inside North East.

That lands within 2.4 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.7 points below the 48.4% North East average, which makes Middlesbrough an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 47.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.10 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Middlesbrough pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.10 times, or £130. Add 1.10 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North East rate of £29 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £223. The test cycle at Middlesbrough is therefore about £353. Testing here therefore costs about £26 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.

A fail at Middlesbrough costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 14.3 weeks in July 2026, 2.4 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.10 expected retakes that is about 15.7 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 3,041 standard slots inside the booking window here and 7.9% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,120 passes from 4,498 first tests at Middlesbrough, 47.1% against 47.7% for all attempts. 163 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.62% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Middlesbrough has fallen by 4.9 points, from 52.6% to 47.7%. Volume has been steady, 8,346 tests then against 8,854 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £52 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.3% and female candidates at 47.0%, a gap of 1.3 points across 4,734 and 4,120 tests. Automatic tests made up 17.5% of the workload and passed at 43.6%, 4.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.3% in February 2026 to 51.3% in November 2025, a 7.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North East, Durham runs 5.5 points higher at 53.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £58 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.