Workington test centre: 61.9% pass rate, £238 to get through it.

Workington is a small centre by DVSA standards: 2,998 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 1,857 were passes, giving 61.9%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 36th of 308 nationally and 3rd of 31 in North West.

That is 11.9 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 12.9 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 61.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.61 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Workington pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.61 times, or £100. Add 0.61 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 £138. The test cycle at Workington is therefore about £238. Testing here therefore saves about £110 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Workington ran to a median 10.9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.0 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.61 expected retakes that is roughly 6.7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 550 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.2% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 1,707 first attempts at Workington, 1,080 passed, a rate of 63.3%, which is 1.3 points above the all-attempts figure. 57 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.34% 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 Workington has risen by 4.7 points, from 57.2% to 61.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,514 to 2,998 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £38 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 63.4% and female candidates at 60.2%, a gap of 3.2 points across 1,607 and 1,391 tests. Automatic tests made up 16.0% of the workload and passed at 51.0%, 10.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 53.5% in April 2025 to 68.1% in August 2025, a 14.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North West, Barrow In Furness runs 7.7 points higher at 69.6%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £51 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.