Northampton test centre: 52.1% pass rate, £338 to get through it.

13,539 candidates took the car practical test at Northampton during 2025/26 and 7,050 of them passed, a pass rate of 52.1%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 150th of 308 on pass rate, and 11th of 20 inside East Midlands.

That lands within 2.0 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.3 points above the 50.8% East Midlands average, which makes Northampton an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.92 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Northampton pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.92 times, or £119. Add 0.92 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 £219. The test cycle at Northampton is therefore about £338. Testing here therefore saves about £24 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Northampton ran to a median 7.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.0 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.92 expected retakes that is roughly 7.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 5,447 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.7% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 3,571 passes from 6,892 first tests at Northampton, 51.8% against 52.1% for all attempts. 335 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.86% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Northampton has risen by 4.2 points, from 47.8% to 52.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 9,732 to 13,539 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £51 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 52.9% and female candidates at 51.0%, a gap of 1.9 points across 7,409 and 6,130 tests. Automatic tests made up 38.0% of the workload and passed at 45.9%, 6.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.0% in October 2025 to 54.1% in June 2025, a 6.1-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 Northampton 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.