Sunderland test centre: 51.1% pass rate, £315 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Sunderland conducted 10,436 car practical tests and issued 5,338 passes. The resulting 51.1% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 176th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 5th of 11 in North East.

That lands within 1.1 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.7 points above the 48.4% North East average, which makes Sunderland an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.96 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Sunderland pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.96 times, or £121. Add 0.96 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North East rate of £29 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £194. The test cycle at Sunderland is therefore about £315. That is within £12 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Sunderland is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Waiting time at Sunderland ran to a median 8.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 3.0 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.96 expected retakes that is roughly 8.5 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 4,650 standard slots inside the booking window here and 21.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,694 passes from 5,253 first tests at Sunderland, 51.3% against 51.1% for all attempts. 393 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 7.48% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Sunderland has risen by 5.9 points, from 45.3% to 51.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,929 to 10,436 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £67 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Sunderland, 51.2% against 51.1%. Automatic tests made up 22.6% of the workload and passed at 42.7%, 8.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.6% in June 2025 to 55.4% in March 2026, a 9.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North East runs more than five points ahead of Sunderland 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.