Portsmouth test centre: 52.8% pass rate, £355 to get through it.

Portsmouth is a high-volume centre, putting 13,518 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 7,141 passed, so the centre finished the year on 52.8% and 137th of 308 nationally, 18th of 32 within South East.

That lands within 2.8 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.3 points below the 53.2% South East average, which makes Portsmouth an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.89 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Portsmouth pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.89 times, or £117. Add 0.89 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 £238. The test cycle at Portsmouth is therefore about £355. Testing here therefore saves about £35 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Portsmouth costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13 weeks in July 2026, 1.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.89 expected retakes that is about 11.6 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 6,096 standard slots inside the booking window here and 19.6% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 3,858 passes from 7,293 first tests at Portsmouth, 52.9% against 52.8% for all attempts. 260 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.57% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Portsmouth has risen by 2.4 points, from 50.4% to 52.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 10,234 to 13,518 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £30 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 53.6% and female candidates at 51.9%, a gap of 1.7 points across 7,637 and 5,881 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.9% of the workload and passed at 46.1%, 6.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.6% in January 2026 to 56.0% in September 2025, a 6.4-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 Portsmouth 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.