Andover Theory Test Centre: 48.91% pass rate

Of the 11,475 car theory tests sat at Andover in the year to March 2026, 5,612 ended in a pass and 5,863 in a fail. 48.91% is 4.07 points above the 44.84% national figure. That is the 39th highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 7th of 24 in the South East. Andover is a mid-sized centre, taking about 956 candidates a month.

Fees are the same £23 nationwide, which makes the pass rate the whole of the cost story. Every theory pass at Andover takes 2.04 sittings on average, so £47.03 of DVSA fees, a little under the £51.29 national figure. Put another way, 51.1% of the £264k paid in theory fees at Andover last year bought a test that did not end in a pass, or £135k.

The recorded gender split separates the two groups at Andover: 50.86% for the 5,318 tests sat by women and 47.21% for the 6,157 sat by men, against a national gap of 4.20 points. That works out at roughly £3.50 of fee difference per licence.

Month to month the rate moves about. February 2026 was the strongest month here at 52.2%, November 2025 the weakest at 44.9%, and May 2025 the busiest with 1,146 sittings. A swing of 7.3 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 0.32 points, from 48.59% to 48.91%. DVSA has published 7 years for this centre. Back in 2016/17 the rate was 53.24%, so today's fee bill per pass is £3.83 higher than the same £23 fee would have produced then, purely because the pass rate has fallen 4.3 points.

The nearest other theory centre is Salisbury, about 17 miles away, where the rate was 50.29%. That is the highest of the five nearest centres, a difference worth £1.29 per pass on paper, and it is still not worth the journey. 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 Andover, the average candidate here needs 2.04 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 3.2% 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. Andover is above that regional figure by 1.60 points.