Warrington test centre: 55.5% pass rate, £291 to get through it.
DVSA conducted 7,550 car practical tests here between April 2025 and March 2026, and 4,193 candidates passed. On the expected-attempts arithmetic that is 1.80 attempts, £112 in DVSA fees and £179 of retake lessons before a licence.
- Pass rate
- 55.5%
- Tests conducted
- 7,550
- National rank
- 98
- Median wait
- 10.6 wk
+5.5 pts vs national
4,193 passes
of 308 ranked centres
July 2026
What passing at Warrington costs
Expected cost of the test cycle for the average candidate at a 55.5% centre.
- Expected attempts (1 ÷ pass rate)1.80
- DVSA fees at £62 weekday£112
- Retake lessons (0.80 × 7 hr × £32)£179
- Test cycle at this centre£291
- Against a national-average centre-£57
- Extra queue time from retakes8.5 wk
Add the parts that do not change with the centre and the full bill from provisional to licence at North West lesson rates is about £1,788: £34 provisional, £23 theory, 45 hours of tuition at £32 (£1,440) and the test cycle above. Full cost stack.
What 55.5% at Warrington actually means for your budget.
Warrington is a mid-sized centre, putting 7,550 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 4,193 passed, so the centre finished the year on 55.5% and 98th of 308 nationally, 10th of 31 within North West.
That is 5.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.5 points above the 49.0% North 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 55.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.80 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Warrington pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.80 times, or £112. Add 0.80 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £179. The test cycle at Warrington is therefore about £291. Testing here therefore saves about £57 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.
Waiting time at Warrington ran to a median 10.6 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.3 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.80 expected retakes that is roughly 8.5 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,154 standard slots inside the booking window here and 16.8% of them were still free to book.
First attempts track the headline closely: 2,217 passes from 3,992 first tests at Warrington, 55.5% against 55.5% for all attempts. 157 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.93% of them.
Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Warrington has fallen by 1.8 points, from 57.3% to 55.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,060 to 7,550 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £16 to the average candidate.
Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Warrington, 55.7% against 55.4%. Automatic tests made up 26.6% of the workload and passed at 48.6%, 7.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 50.7% in June 2025 to 58.8% in November 2025, a 8.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.
None of the similarly sized centres in North West runs more than five points ahead of Warrington 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.
Warrington vs its region and the country.
- Rank in North West
- 10 of 31
- First-attempt rate
- 55.5%
- Zero-fault first passes
- 157
- Automatic pass rate
- 48.6%
- Male candidates
- 55.7%
- Female candidates
- 55.4%
+6.5 pts vs region
3,992 first tests
3.93% of first attempts
26.6% of tests here
3,976 tests
3,574 tests
Down 1.8 points since 2021/22.
Dashed line: the 50.03% national pass rate for 2025/26.
Weeks between booking and taking the test, DVSA table DRT122F. Latest reading 10.6 weeks, 1.3 below the 11.9-week median across all centres.
A 17-year-old passes at 66.6% here. A 25-year-old passes at 53.2%.
The single figure most people quote for Warrington is the all-ages 55.5%. Underneath it, 1,460 tests by 17-year-olds returned 66.6% and 203 by 25-year-olds returned 53.2%. That is 13.4 points, against 14.9 points between the same two ages across Great Britain.
Put that through the same arithmetic the rest of this page uses and the gap stops being academic. A 17-year-old at Warrington expects 1.50 attempts, £206 in fees and retake lessons. A 25-year-old expects 1.88 attempts and £314, £108 more on identical £62 fees and the same £32 North West lesson rate. The only thing that moved was the pass rate.
17-year-olds here pass 3.0 points above the 63.6% that 17-year-olds manage nationally. Against North West, where the same age passes 63.5%, they are 3.1 points ahead. Either way, budgeting a 17-year-old against this centre's all-ages 55.5% is pessimistic by 11.0 points.
Warrington is large enough that DVSA published every age cell from 17 to 25 with its counts intact, which is true of 187 of the 307 centre pages here. Nothing in the table above is withheld, rounded up from a small base or filled in by us.
Age here is a proxy, and it is worth saying so plainly. The DVSA figures carry no information about lesson history, instructor or hours, so the gap above is what the record shows rather than an explanation of it. The practical implication is about continuity of tuition, not about waiting or not waiting to book.
- Age 17 here
- 66.6%
- Age 25 here
- 53.2%
- Age gap
- +13.4 pts
- Age 17 vs country
- +3.0 pts
1,460 tests
203 tests
national gap +14.9 pts
63.6% nationally
Pass rate by age at Warrington
DVSA table DRT122D, April 2025 to March 2026. Dashed line is the same age across Great Britain.
What each age costs at Warrington, on the same arithmetic as the rest of this page.
Expected attempts is 1 ÷ the pass rate for that age, fees are £62 an attempt and retake lessons are 7 hours at the North West rate of £32. Ages where DVSA withheld the counts are shown as withheld and are not priced: a rate the agency would not put a denominator against is not a rate to budget from.
| Age | Tests conducted | Passes | Pass rate | Expected attempts | Test cycle cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | 1,460 | 972 | 66.6% | 1.50 | £206 |
| 18 | 1,105 | 681 | 61.6% | 1.62 | £240 |
| 19 | 486 | 279 | 57.4% | 1.74 | £274 |
| 20 | 331 | 189 | 57.1% | 1.75 | £277 |
| 21 | 231 | 134 | 58.0% | 1.72 | £269 |
| 22 | 268 | 155 | 57.8% | 1.73 | £270 |
| 23 | 231 | 121 | 52.4% | 1.91 | £322 |
| 24 | 189 | 108 | 57.1% | 1.75 | £277 |
| 25 | 203 | 108 | 53.2% | 1.88 | £314 |
| Under 26 | 4,504 | 2,747 | 61.0% | 1.64 | £245 |
| All ages | 7,550 | 4,193 | 55.5% | 1.80 | £291 |
The under-26 row is DVSA’s own block total from DRT122D and counts the withheld cells, so it will exceed the sum of the ages printed above it wherever a cell is withheld. The all-ages row is DRT122A, the figure the rest of this page uses. Nothing on this table is estimated or back-filled.
What the age gap is worth at Warrington
- Expected attempts, age 171.50
- Expected attempts, age 251.88
- Test cycle at age 17£206
- Test cycle at age 25£314
- Cost of waiting from 17 to 25+£108
- Extra queue time from the extra retakes4 wk
Pass rates are DVSA’s. The pounds are ours, on the same fee and lesson rate the rest of this page uses, applied to each age’s published rate and nothing else. Age is not the cause: the DVSA figures describe who passed, not why, and a 17-year-old mid-course typically arrives with recent, continuous tuition behind them. The national age curve.
Every published financial year at Warrington.
| Financial year | Conducted | Passed | Pass rate | Expected attempts | Test cycle cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 7,550 | 4,193 | 55.5% | 1.80 | £291 |
| 2024/25 | 6,124 | 3,385 | 55.3% | 1.81 | £293 |
| 2023/24 | 6,105 | 3,239 | 53.0% | 1.89 | £315 |
| 2022/23 | 5,538 | 2,940 | 53.1% | 1.88 | £315 |
| 2021/22 | 5,060 | 2,901 | 57.3% | 1.74 | £275 |
| 2020/21 | 1,603 | 991 | 61.8% | 1.62 | £239 |
| 2019/20 | 5,080 | 2,745 | 54.0% | 1.85 | £305 |
| 2018/19 | 5,428 | 2,900 | 53.4% | 1.87 | £311 |
| 2017/18 | 5,630 | 2,941 | 52.2% | 1.91 | £323 |
| 2016/17 | 4,601 | 2,222 | 48.3% | 2.07 | £368 |
Cost columns apply today’s £62 fee and the current £32 lesson rate to each year’s pass rate, so the column isolates what the pass rate does to the bill. The fee itself has moved over time; see fee history.
A 8.1-point swing across the year.
Monthly figures are why a single quarter is a poor guide. Nothing about the centre changed between June 2025 and November 2025; the mix of candidates did.
| Month | Conducted | Passed | Pass rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2025 | 612 | 340 | 55.6% |
| May 2025 | 568 | 315 | 55.5% |
| June 2025 | 645 | 327 | 50.7% |
| July 2025 | 652 | 349 | 53.5% |
| August 2025 | 570 | 331 | 58.1% |
| September 2025 | 695 | 371 | 53.4% |
| October 2025 | 698 | 384 | 55.0% |
| November 2025 | 575 | 338 | 58.8% |
| December 2025 | 608 | 346 | 56.9% |
| January 2026 | 635 | 355 | 55.9% |
| February 2026 | 604 | 344 | 57.0% |
| March 2026 | 688 | 393 | 57.1% |
The five North West centres closest in size to Warrington.
Matched on annual test volume rather than distance, because a centre doing 7,550 tests a year faces a comparable road and traffic mix. Cost column uses the North West lesson rate of £32 throughout, so the only variable is the pass rate.
| Centre | Pass rate | Tests | Median wait | Test cycle cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warrington (this centre) | 55.5% | 7,550 | 10.6 wk | £291 |
| Southport (Liverpool) | 56.5% | 7,949 | 16.9 wk | £282 |
| Bury (Manchester) | 46.3% | 7,024 | 7.6 wk | £393 |
| Speke (Liverpool) | 40.5% | 8,159 | 8.3 wk | £481 |
| Widnes | 42.7% | 6,846 | 6.9 wk | £446 |
| Blackpool | 51.8% | 8,948 | 8.9 wk | £328 |
Higher pass rate in North West
- Bredbury (Manchester)56.0%
- Preston56.3%
- Southport (Liverpool)56.5%
- Northwich57.6%
Lower pass rate in North West
- Wallasey54.3%
- Chorley52.8%
- Upton52.6%
- Macclesfield51.9%
Source and provenance
Pass rates, test volumes, gender splits and waiting times on this page are published statistics from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), taken from Driving test and theory test data: cars, tables DRT122A (Car driving test pass rates by gender and month: test centres, updated 2026-06-25), DRT122C (Car driving test pass rates by first driving attempt and gender, including zero faults: test centres, updated 2026-06-25), DRT122D (Car driving test pass rates by age (17 to 25 year olds), year and test centre, updated 2026-06-25), DRT122E (Automatic car driving test pass rates by gender: test centres, updated 2026-06-25) and DRT122F (Car driving test waiting times and availability by driving test centre, updated 2026-08-12). Centre-level figures cover the April 2025 to March 2026 financial year; the national quarterly series runs to June 2026. Snapshot taken 2026-09-04.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Cost figures are drivingtestcost.com’s own, from the GOV.UK fee schedule and our regional lesson survey; DVSA publishes no prices and none of the money on this page comes from DVSA.
drivingtestcost.com is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the DVSA, the DVA or GOV.UK. Pass rates are DVSA published statistics reproduced under the Open Government Licence, not our assessment of any centre. Great Britain only; Northern Ireland tests are run separately by the DVA. DVSA cautions that centre figures below about 100 tests a year are not robust for comparison.
Age figures are single years of age from DRT122D and are reproduced exactly as published, withheld cells included. DVSA replaces the counts in small age cells with “..”, in most cases while still printing that cell’s pass rate; those cells are shown here as withheld and are excluded from every comparison, ranking and cost figure on this page. Nothing withheld is reconstructed from the block total.