Yeovil test centre: 63.4% pass rate, £243 to get through it.

7,493 candidates took the car practical test at Yeovil during 2025/26 and 4,752 of them passed, a pass rate of 63.4%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 29th of 308 on pass rate, and 2nd of 21 inside South West.

That is 13.4 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 11.7 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 63.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.58 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Yeovil pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.58 times, or £98. Add 0.58 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 £145. The test cycle at Yeovil is therefore about £243. Testing here therefore saves about £133 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Yeovil costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 16.3 weeks in July 2026, 4.4 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.58 expected retakes that is about 9.4 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,960 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.6% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,789 passes from 4,348 first tests at Yeovil, 64.1% against 63.4% for all attempts. 162 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.73% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Yeovil has fallen by 1.1 points, from 64.5% to 63.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,226 to 7,493 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £8 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 65.2% and female candidates at 61.4%, a gap of 3.8 points across 4,031 and 3,462 tests. Automatic tests made up 18.7% of the workload and passed at 57.2%, 6.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 57.9% in August 2025 to 67.5% in September 2025, a 9.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in South West runs more than five points ahead of Yeovil 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.