Pinner (London) test centre: 49.7% pass rate, £429 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Pinner (London) conducted 14,367 car practical tests and issued 7,143 passes. The resulting 49.7% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 202nd of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 14th of 26 in London.

That lands within 0.3 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.9 points above the 48.8% London average, which makes Pinner (London) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 49.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.01 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Pinner (London) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.01 times, or £125. Add 1.01 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the London rate of £43 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £304. The test cycle at Pinner (London) is therefore about £429. That is within £4 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Pinner (London) is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

The queue is the expensive part at Pinner (London). DVSA recorded a median wait of 23.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.01 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 23.4 extra weeks of waiting, close to 5 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 5,224 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.2% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 7,556 candidates sat their first test at Pinner (London) and 3,663 passed, 48.5%, which is 1.2 points below the all-attempts rate. 214 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.83% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Pinner (London) has risen by 1.2 points, from 48.5% to 49.7%. Volume has been steady, 14,656 tests then against 14,367 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £19 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 53.8% and female candidates at 45.6%, a gap of 8.2 points across 7,166 and 7,201 tests. Automatic tests made up 50.0% of the workload and passed at 47.6%, 2.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 47.2% in March 2026 to 53.8% in May 2025, a 6.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in London, Sidcup (London) runs 9.0 points higher at 58.7%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £112 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.