Scarborough test centre: 45.1% pass rate, £411 to get through it.

3,595 candidates took the car practical test at Scarborough during 2025/26 and 1,620 of them passed, a pass rate of 45.1%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 263rd of 308 on pass rate, and 26th of 29 inside Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 5.0 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 5.4 points below the 50.5% average for Yorkshire and The Humber. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 45.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.22 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Scarborough pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.22 times, or £138. Add 1.22 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Yorkshire & Humber rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £273. The test cycle at Scarborough is therefore about £411. Testing here therefore costs about £63 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 Scarborough was 7 weeks in July 2026, 4.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.22 expected retakes add only around 8.5 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 987 standard slots inside the booking window here and 11.8% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 717 passes from 1,586 first tests at Scarborough, 45.2% against 45.1% for all attempts. 17 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.07% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Scarborough has fallen by 1.7 points, from 46.8% to 45.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,366 to 3,595 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £23 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Scarborough, 44.8% against 45.5%. Automatic tests made up 19.8% of the workload and passed at 36.4%, 8.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 39.1% in November 2025 to 52.1% in July 2025, a 13.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Yorkshire and The Humber, Northallerton runs 15.3 points higher at 60.4%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £161 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.