Horley Theory Test Centre: 47.30% pass rate

DVSA recorded 18,913 car theory tests at Horley between April 2025 and March 2026, of which 8,945 were passes and 9,968 were fails. The pass rate was 47.30%, against 44.84% across Great Britain. That is the 55th highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 11th of 24 in the South East. Horley is a high-volume centre, working through roughly 1,576 sittings a month.

The theory test fee is £23 at every centre in Great Britain, so what changes from place to place is not the price of one sitting but how many sittings a licence takes. Every theory pass at Horley takes 2.11 sittings on average, so £48.63 of DVSA fees, a little under the £51.29 national figure. The 9,968 fails at Horley last year came to £229k in fees paid for tests that had to be taken again, out of £435k taken at this centre in total.

The recorded gender split separates the two groups at Horley: 49.48% for the 8,377 tests sat by women and 45.56% for the 10,536 sat by men, against a national gap of 4.20 points. That works out at roughly £4.00 of fee difference per licence.

Across the twelve published months the rate ranged from 44.0% in May 2025 to 49.2% in August 2025, with the heaviest month being March 2026 at 1,985 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. Horley rose 0.96 points from 2024/25, and across the 5 years DVSA publishes for this centre the rate has moved from 53.40% in 2021/22 to 47.30% now. Applying today's £23 fee to both, the expected cost of a pass has gone from £43.07 to £48.63.

Horley sits 14 miles from Croydon, its closest neighbour, which recorded 45.83%. Guildford, 18 miles out, is the strongest of the five nearest at 53.98%, a difference worth £6.02 per pass on paper, and still not worth the journey. Travelling changes nothing you can bank: every centre runs the same question bank and the same 43-out-of-50 pass mark, and DVSA charges the same £23 wherever you sit it.

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 Horley, the average candidate here needs 2.11 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 3.3% 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. Horley is below that regional figure by 0.01 points.