Rushden Theory Test Centre: 52.00% pass rate
DVSA recorded 100 car theory tests here in April 2025 to March 2026 and 52 passes. The fee is £23 a sitting everywhere in Great Britain, so at this rate a pass takes £44.23 of test fees.
Of the 100 car theory tests sat at Rushden in the year to March 2026, 52 ended in a pass and 48 in a fail. 52.00% is 7.16 points above the 44.84% national figure. That is the 10th highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 1st of 13 in the East Midlands. Rushden is one of the smallest centres DVSA reports, with fewer than 10 sittings in a typical 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. Because more candidates pass first time here, the fee bill per licence is lighter than average: £44.23 of DVSA fees for every theory pass, £7.06 less than the national £51.29. The 48 fails at Rushden last year came to £1k in fees paid for tests that had to be taken again, out of £2k taken at this centre in total.
DVSA publishes the split by recorded gender. Women passed at 55.56% here against 47.83%, a difference of 7.73 points, where the national gap is 4.20 points. In fee terms the group with the lower rate spends about £6.69 more per pass at this centre.
Against 2024/25 the rate slipped by 2.47 points, from 54.47% to 52.00%. DVSA has published 5 years for this centre. Back in 2021/22 the rate was 60.80%, so today's fee bill per pass is £6.40 higher than the same £23 fee would have produced then, purely because the pass rate has fallen 8.8 points.
The nearest other theory centre is Northampton, about 13 miles away, where the rate was 44.12%. None of the five nearest centres records a higher rate than Rushden, 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 £44.23 of fees a pass takes at Rushden is 3.0% of the £1,470 minimum cost of learning to drive on this site's Midlands lesson band, the closest published row to East Midlands. 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 East Midlands as a whole, DVSA recorded 223,311 car theory tests at 14 centres over the same twelve months, a pass rate of 43.87% and £52.42 of fees per pass. Rushden is above that regional figure by 8.13 points.
Rushden at a glance
- Financial year
- 2025/26
- Tests conducted
- 100
- Passes
- 52
- Pass rate
- 52.00%
- Rank, Great Britainhighest pass rate first
- 10 of 165
- Rank in East Midlands
- 1 of 13
- Male pass rate46 tests
- 47.83%
- Female pass rate54 tests
- 55.56%
- Gender gapfemale minus male
- +7.73 pts
- Year on yearfrom 2024/25 (54.47%)
- -2.47 pts
- Years published
- 5
- Region
- East Midlands
- County or unitary
- North Northamptonshire
- Nearest other centre
- Northampton, 13 mi
- SnapshotDVSA table DRT112A
- 2026-09-05
The £23 fee, applied to Rushden
The theory test fee does not vary by centre, so this table is the same £23 arithmetic everywhere, run against Rushden's own published pass rate. It describes what theory testing costs the candidates who book here on average. It is not a prediction for one person, and it is not a reason to travel: the question bank and the pass mark are national.
| Measure | Rushden | East Midlands | Great Britain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pass rate | 52.00% | 43.87% | 44.84% |
| Sittings per pass | 1.92 | 2.28 | 2.23 |
| DVSA fees per pass | £44.23 | £52.42 | £51.29 |
| On top of one £23 sitting | £21.23 | £29.42 | £28.29 |
| Against the national average | -£7.06 | +£1.13 | £0.00 |
| Fees paid on tests that failed | £1,104 | £2.9m | £37.1m |
Sittings per pass is tests conducted divided by passes, so it counts everyone who sat at this centre, including repeat attempts. Fees per pass is that figure multiplied by the £23 DVSA fee. The fee is ours, from the fee page; the counts are DVSA's.
One retake buys nothing
A second sitting is another full £23. There is no retake discount. The official DVSA revision app is £4.99, so a retake costs about 5 times as much as the thing that would have prevented it.
Share of the learner bill
At Rushden's rate the theory fee works out at 3.0% of the £1,470 minimum cost of learning to drive, alongside lessons at about £33 an hour on this site's Midlands band, the closest published row to East Midlands. See the full budget.
The two-year clock
A theory pass lasts 2 years. Miss that window before the practical and the £23 is due again. Retakes also need 3 clear working days between attempts, so a fail costs time as well as money.
What the pass rate alone has done to the bill
Today's £23 fee applied to each year's published pass rate at Rushden. The fee is held constant on purpose, so the only thing moving the right-hand column is how often candidates passed.
| Year | Tests | Passes | Pass rate | Fees per pass at today's £23 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 100 | 52 | 52.00% | £44.23 |
| 2024/25 | 123 | 67 | 54.47% | £42.22 |
| 2023/24 | 118 | 53 | 44.92% | £51.21 |
| 2022/23 | 212 | 91 | 42.92% | £53.58 |
| 2021/22 | 79 | 48 | 60.80% | £37.85 |
Theory test centres near Rushden
The five closest centres by road-distance proxy. DVSA publishes no address for a theory test centre, so distances are measured town centre to town centre and are indicative. They are here for context, not as a shopping list: the fee and the test are identical at all of them.
| Centre | Distance | Tests | Pass rate | Fees per pass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northampton | 13 mi | 29,016 | 44.12% | £52.13 |
| Corby | 14 mi | 11,626 | 45.13% | £50.96 |
| Huntingdon (low volume) | 18 mi | 63 | 46.03% | £49.97 |
| Milton Keynes | 18 mi | 27,333 | 46.58% | £49.38 |
| Peterborough | 25 mi | 22,356 | 42.25% | £54.43 |
More centres on the the East Midlands page, which covers 14 centres and 223,311 tests, or in the full directory.
Where these figures come from
Test volumes, passes, pass rates and gender splits on this page are published statistics from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, taken from the GOV.UK statistical data set Driving test and theory test data: cars:
- DRT112A, Car theory test pass rates by gender and month: test centres. Updated 2026-07-17, covering April 2007 to March 2026.
- DRT111A, Car theory tests conducted, passed and pass rates by financial quarter and financial year: Great Britain. Updated 2026-09-03, covering April 2007 to June 2026.
Centre-level figures cover the April 2025 to March 2026 financial year, the most recent full year DVSA publishes at centre level. Snapshot taken 2026-09-05. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
DVSA publishes no region or address for theory test centres. Each centre is named after its town, and the town's country, region, county and centre point come from OS Open Names. Source: Ordnance Survey Open Names, via postcodes.io, Open Government Licence v3.0.
Every pound on this page is theorytestcost.com's own arithmetic on the £23 DVSA fee and the cost figures published elsewhere on this site. DVSA publishes no prices and none of the money here comes from DVSA.
theorytestcost.com is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the DVSA, the DVA or GOV.UK. Pass rates are DVSA published statistics reproduced under the Open Government Licence, not our assessment of any centre. Great Britain only: theory tests in Northern Ireland are run separately by the DVA. DVSA cautions that centre figures below about 100 tests a year are not robust for comparison, and withholds a centre's figures entirely where publishing them could identify an individual.