Skipton test centre: 57.3% pass rate, £275 to get through it.

Skipton is a mid-sized centre, putting 3,197 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 1,831 passed, so the centre finished the year on 57.3% and 74th of 308 nationally, 6th of 29 within Yorkshire and The Humber.

That is 7.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.8 points above the 50.5% Yorkshire and The Humber average. A centre in this band is usually working quieter road layouts with fewer forced lane decisions, not a softer marking standard: the DVSA marking sheet is national.

Turn 57.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.75 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Skipton pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.75 times, or £108. Add 0.75 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 £167. The test cycle at Skipton is therefore about £275. Testing here therefore saves about £73 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Skipton ran to a median 11 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.9 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.75 expected retakes that is roughly 8.2 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 760 standard slots inside the booking window here and 7.8% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 1,782 candidates sat their first test at Skipton and 989 passed, 55.5%, which is 1.8 points below the all-attempts rate. 19 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.07% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Skipton has risen by 2.6 points, from 54.7% to 57.3%. Volume has been steady, 3,059 tests then against 3,197 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £24 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 60.2% and female candidates at 54.0%, a gap of 6.2 points across 1,700 and 1,497 tests. Automatic tests made up 10.2% of the workload and passed at 55.1%, 2.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 54.0% in September 2025 to 61.9% in June 2025, a 7.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Yorkshire and The Humber runs more than five points ahead of Skipton 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.