Trowbridge test centre: 55.2% pass rate, £316 to get through it.

Trowbridge is a mid-sized centre, putting 3,074 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 1,698 passed, so the centre finished the year on 55.2% and 105th of 308 nationally, 7th of 21 within South West.

That is 5.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 3.5 points above the 51.7% South West 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 55.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.81 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Trowbridge pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.81 times, or £112. Add 0.81 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 £204. The test cycle at Trowbridge is therefore about £316. Testing here therefore saves about £60 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Trowbridge 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 0.81 expected retakes that is roughly 7.2 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,367 standard slots inside the booking window here and 17.0% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 1,572 first attempts at Trowbridge, 886 passed, a rate of 56.4%, which is 1.1 points above the all-attempts figure. 70 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.45% 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 Trowbridge has risen by 4.9 points, from 50.4% to 55.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,574 to 3,074 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £55 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.4% and female candidates at 53.2%, a gap of 4.2 points across 1,481 and 1,593 tests. Automatic tests made up 16.0% of the workload and passed at 51.5%, 3.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.2% in February 2026 to 64.6% in May 2025, a 16.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in South West, Dorchester runs 13.7 points higher at 69.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £113 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.