Swansea test centre: 48.2% pass rate, £369 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Swansea conducted 12,375 car practical tests and issued 5,970 passes. The resulting 48.2% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 221st of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 19th of 21 in Wales.

That lands within 1.8 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 4.1 points below the 52.4% Wales average, which makes Swansea an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.07 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Swansea pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.07 times, or £129. Add 1.07 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Wales rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £240. The test cycle at Swansea is therefore about £369. Testing here therefore costs about £21 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 Swansea was 5.9 weeks in July 2026, 6.0 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.07 expected retakes add only around 6.3 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 4,733 standard slots inside the booking window here and 59.8% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 5,695 first attempts at Swansea, 2,916 passed, a rate of 51.2%, which is 3.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 128 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.25% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Swansea has fallen by 1.1 points, from 49.3% to 48.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,836 to 12,375 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £13 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.8% and female candidates at 47.6%, a gap of 1.2 points across 6,903 and 5,472 tests. Automatic tests made up 27.2% of the workload and passed at 38.4%, 9.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.1% in August 2025 to 51.8% in April 2025, a 6.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Wales, Llantrisant runs 5.8 points higher at 54.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £63 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.