Salisbury test centre: 48.5% pass rate, £396 to get through it.

Salisbury is a mid-sized centre, putting 6,630 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 3,215 passed, so the centre finished the year on 48.5% and 218th of 308 nationally, 13th of 21 within South West.

That lands within 1.5 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 3.3 points below the 51.7% South West average, which makes Salisbury an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.06 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Salisbury pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.06 times, or £128. Add 1.06 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the South West rate of £36 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £268. The test cycle at Salisbury is therefore about £396. Testing here therefore costs about £20 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.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Salisbury was 5.3 weeks in July 2026, 6.6 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.06 expected retakes add only around 5.6 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 3,266 standard slots inside the booking window here and 31.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,641 passes from 3,395 first tests at Salisbury, 48.3% against 48.5% for all attempts. 136 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.01% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Salisbury has fallen by 6.2 points, from 54.7% to 48.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,418 to 6,630 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £74 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Salisbury, 48.2% against 48.8%. Automatic tests made up 24.3% of the workload and passed at 37.0%, 11.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 44.2% in August 2025 to 52.2% in October 2025, a 8.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Newton Abbot runs 5.3 points higher at 53.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £64 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.