Taunton Theory Test Centre: 46.37% pass rate

Of the 9,757 car theory tests sat at Taunton in the year to March 2026, 4,524 ended in a pass and 5,233 in a fail. 46.37% is 1.53 points above the 44.84% national figure. That is the 73rd highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 17th of 22 in the South West. Taunton is a mid-sized centre, taking about 813 candidates a month.

Every theory pass at Taunton takes 2.16 sittings on average, so £49.60 of DVSA fees, a little under the £51.29 national figure. None of that is a difference in price. DVSA charges £23 a sitting everywhere, and there is no discount for a retake, so the only thing that moves the bill is the number of attempts. The 5,233 fails recorded at Taunton account for £120k of the £224k paid in fees here.

DVSA publishes the split by recorded gender. Women passed at 48.97% here against 44.13%, a difference of 4.84 points, where the national gap is 4.20 points. In fee terms the group with the lower rate spends about £5.15 more per pass at this centre.

Across the twelve published months the rate ranged from 41.9% in September 2025 to 48.9% in December 2025, with the heaviest month being March 2026 at 1,010 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. Taunton rose 0.37 points from 2024/25, and across the 19 years DVSA publishes for this centre the rate has moved from 69.01% in 2007/08 to 46.37% now. Applying today's £23 fee to both, the expected cost of a pass has gone from £33.33 to £49.60.

The nearest other theory centre is Williton, about 14 miles away, where the rate was 46.46%. Exeter, 27 miles out, is the strongest of the five nearest at 50.62%, a difference worth £4.16 per pass on paper, and 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.

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 £49.60 of fees a pass takes at Taunton is 3.4% of the £1,470 minimum cost of learning to drive on this site's South 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 South West as a whole, DVSA recorded 208,634 car theory tests at 22 centres over the same twelve months, a pass rate of 47.90% and £48.02 of fees per pass. Taunton is below that regional figure by 1.53 points.