Kendal Theory Test Centre: 51.24% pass rate

DVSA recorded 4,348 car theory tests at Kendal between April 2025 and March 2026, of which 2,228 were passes and 2,120 were fails. The pass rate was 51.24%, against 44.84% across Great Britain. That is the 15th highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 1st of 13 in the North West. Kendal is a mid-sized centre, taking about 362 candidates 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: £44.89 of DVSA fees for every theory pass, £6.40 less than the national £51.29. Put another way, 48.8% of the £100k paid in theory fees at Kendal last year bought a test that did not end in a pass, or £49k.

The recorded gender split separates the two groups at Kendal: 53.94% for the 1,969 tests sat by women and 49.01% for the 2,379 sat by men, against a national gap of 4.20 points. That works out at roughly £4.29 of fee difference per licence.

Month to month the rate moves about. April 2025 was the strongest month here at 57.9%, December 2025 the weakest at 48.0%, and August 2025 the busiest with 482 sittings. A swing of 9.9 points across one year is normal in a sample this size and is not a reason to time a booking.

Against 2024/25 the rate rose by 1.99 points, from 49.25% to 51.24%. DVSA has published 7 years for this centre. Back in 2016/17 the rate was 55.04%, so today's fee bill per pass is £3.10 higher than the same £23 fee would have produced then, purely because the pass rate has fallen 3.8 points.

The nearest other theory centre is Millom, about 23 miles away, where the rate was 48.89%. None of the five nearest centres records a higher rate than Kendal, 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.

The lever a candidate actually controls is revision, not location. At £23 a sitting, a single failed attempt costs more than the £4.99 official app and the £15 book put together, and the £44.89 of fees a pass takes at Kendal is 3.1% of the £1,470 minimum cost of learning to drive on this site's North West lesson band. There is also a clock: a theory pass is valid for 2 years, and letting it lapse before the practical means paying the £23 again from scratch.

Across the North West as a whole, DVSA recorded 356,059 car theory tests at 14 centres over the same twelve months, a pass rate of 44.07% and £52.19 of fees per pass. Kendal is above that regional figure by 7.17 points.