Guildford Theory Test Centre: 53.98% pass rate

Of the 14,826 car theory tests sat at Guildford in the year to March 2026, 8,003 ended in a pass and 6,823 in a fail. 53.98% is 9.14 points above the 44.84% national figure. That is the 3rd highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 2nd of 24 in the South East. Guildford is a high-volume centre, working through roughly 1,236 sittings a month.

Fees are the same £23 nationwide, which makes the pass rate the whole of the cost story. Because more candidates pass first time here, the fee bill per licence is lighter than average: £42.61 of DVSA fees for every theory pass, £8.68 less than the national £51.29. Put another way, 46.0% of the £341k paid in theory fees at Guildford last year bought a test that did not end in a pass, or £157k.

DVSA publishes the split by recorded gender. Women passed at 55.61% here against 52.55%, a difference of 3.06 points, where the national gap is 4.20 points. In fee terms the group with the lower rate spends about £2.41 more per pass at this centre.

Across the twelve published months the rate ranged from 51.3% in November 2025 to 56.8% in March 2026, with the heaviest month being March 2026 at 1,536 sittings. Nothing about the test changes between months, so the spread reflects who happened to book.

The direction of travel matters more than any single year. Guildford rose 0.43 points from 2024/25, and across the 19 years DVSA publishes for this centre the rate has moved from 71.73% in 2007/08 to 53.98% now. Applying today's £23 fee to both, the expected cost of a pass has gone from £32.06 to £42.61.

The nearest other theory centre is Aldershot, about 8 miles away, where the rate was 47.79%. None of the five nearest centres records a higher rate than Guildford, so there is nothing to chase even on paper. The questions, the clips and the pass mark are set nationally and do not vary by building, so a centre's rate describes the people who booked there rather than the difficulty of the test.

What does change the bill is preparation. One retake costs £23, which is 5 times the £4.99 price of the official DVSA revision app and more than the £15 print book. On the April 2025 to March 2026 figures for Guildford, the average candidate here needs 1.85 sittings, so budgeting for one attempt and nothing else is optimistic. Set against the wider learner bill, with lessons at about £38 an hour on this site's South East band, the theory fee is 2.9% of the £1,470 minimum.

Across the South East as a whole, DVSA recorded 371,516 car theory tests at 24 centres over the same twelve months, a pass rate of 47.31% and £48.62 of fees per pass. Guildford is above that regional figure by 6.67 points.