Driving test faults
Driving test faults — driving, serious and dangerous
Last reviewed against gov.uk on
The practical driving test is marked in three grades: a driving fault, a serious fault and a dangerous fault. You pass with up to 15 driving faults and no serious or dangerous ones. That arithmetic is why you can fail with zero minors, why the examiner carries on driving after you have already lost, and why the same mistake is a nothing on one test and a fail on the next.
A serious fault is one that is potentially dangerous or entails a breach of the law.
The three grades
| Grade | Definition | Effect on the result |
|---|---|---|
| Driving fault (“minor”) | Falls short of, or deviates from, the standard of a safe and competent driver, but is not potentially dangerous | Up to 15 is a pass. The 16th fails the test |
| Serious fault (“major”) | Potentially dangerous, or entails a breach of the law | One fails the test outright |
| Dangerous fault (“major”) | Involves actual danger to you, the examiner, the public or property | One fails the test outright |
There is a fourth grade you never see: not worthy. An insignificant deviation that does not compromise safety — dry steering, a sequential gear change, not pressing the handbrake button — is simply not recorded. Most of what learners agonise over lives here.
How a driving fault becomes a serious one
A single driving fault is survivable by definition. Repetition is what changes its grade.
In isolation a driving fault does not result in failure to pass the test. However a candidate who habitually commits a driving fault in one aspect of driving throughout the test, cannot be regarded as competent to pass the test. The repeated fault can then be assessed as potentially dangerous.
So the third missed mirror check is not simply “another minor”. Once a fault is habitual in one aspect of your driving, it can be assessed as potentially dangerous and marked serious — which is how a test ends in a major long before the count gets anywhere near 15.
The reverse also happens. A breach of a legal requirement is a serious fault straight away, with no build-up: not stopping for a red light, driving well above the limit, ignoring a stop sign. Nothing has to go wrong for it to count.
The three questions behind every mark
Examiners do not score against a feeling. Every fault is measured against a defined outcome — the thing a safe, competent driver would have done in that spot — and anything between that outcome and what you actually did is the fault. Its grade depends on how far apart the two are.
Three tools decide whether the gap is worth recording at all:
- The first rule of assessment. If the drive was perfect before and perfect after this fault occurred, would this fault and this fault alone, cause the candidate to fail their test? The fault is judged in isolation, not coloured by the rest of the drive. It is why a strong test does not earn you leniency on a major, and a scrappy one does not turn a minor into one.
- The 16th-fault rule. If this was the 16th fault, could you justify it resulting in the candidate failing their test? Applied to every fault, first or last. If the answer is no, it is not worthy and is not written down.
- Adding and taking away. Could you add anything to that fault to make it worse? Or could you take away anything to make it better? Brushing a kerb could have been bumping or mounting it (worse), or could have been a clean manoeuvre with the car positioned slightly further from the kerb (better) — so it sits low.
Two rules of bookkeeping follow from this. Driving errors must not be double-marked, so one event produces one fault, not a cascade. And where a fault has a cause and an effect, the effect is what gets marked if it is the greater of the two — approach a junction too fast and then emerge into traffic, and it appears on the report under Junctions – Observations, not as speed.
“Examiner took action” — ETA
If the examiner has to intervene to keep things safe, the report records an ETA. It comes in two forms: verbal (ETA-V) and physical (ETA-P) — the dual controls, or a hand on the wheel.
An ETA is not itself the fault; it is a record of the intervention. Advice given when there is no immediate danger is not an ETA at all. And a dangerous fault is marked as dangerous whether or not the examiner had to act — the absence of an intervention does not downgrade it.
Why the test carries on after you have failed
Examiners do not volunteer a running score, and the drive continues. Stopping the test has a far higher bar than failing it.
You can carry on if you make a mistake. It might not affect your test result if it’s not serious. Your driving examiner will only stop your test if they think your driving is a danger to other road users.
The one exception at the front end is the eyesight check: you read a number plate at 20 metres (20.5 metres for an old-style plate), you get three attempts, and failing it ends the test there.
The top 10 reasons people fail
The ten fault headings behind the most failures barely move from year to year. These are the headings for April 2025 to March 2026, and each maps to a named box on the test report — so the wording below is what you will see on your own result.
| # | Fault heading on your report | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Junctions – Observations | Emerging without effective observation, or misjudging the speed of an approaching vehicle so it has to slow |
| 2 | Mirrors – Change direction | Changing lane or direction without checking, including exiting a multi-lane roundabout |
| 3 | Junctions – Turning right | Positioning too far left while waiting, or taking a right-hand exit from the left lane of a roundabout |
| 4 | Response to signs and signals – Traffic lights | Not reacting to a red, stopping in the cyclists’ advanced stop box, or blocking a junction on green |
| 5 | Control – Steering | Understeering into turns, mounting the kerb, or the “swan neck” right turn onto the wrong side |
| 6 | Moving off – Safety | Pulling out from the kerb, a gradient or behind a parked vehicle without the blind-spot check |
| 7 | Response to signs and signals – Road markings | Ignoring lane arrows, straddling lanes on a roundabout, crossing a solid white line unnecessarily |
| 8 | Response to signs and signals – Traffic signs | Passing the wrong side of a keep-left sign, ignoring stop or no-entry, reacting late to a limit change |
| 9 | Positioning – Normal driving | Hugging the kerb or the centre line, or sitting in the right-hand lane of a dual carriageway |
| 10 | Progress – Appropriate speed | Driving well below a safe and reasonable speed for the road, or hesitating and holding up other traffic when it was safe to proceed |
Six of those ten headings are observation and response; three are positioning and control, and one is speed. There are 27 skills in total you need to learn to become a safe driver and pass the test, and this is where the failures concentrate.
Questions that come up every time
“I failed with 0 minors. How?”
Normally. The 15 allowance and the one-major rule are independent conditions, not a running total — a clean drive plus one serious fault is a fail, and 15 driving faults with nothing worse is a pass. Zero-fault passes are counted as their own line in the DVSA test statistics.
“Another driver did something stupid during my test. Can that fail me?”
What goes on the report is your response to it, assessed against the defined outcome for that situation. Under awareness and planning, a late reaction to what other road users are doing is a driving fault; a last-minute and sudden reaction to other road users compromising their safety is a serious one. Someone else’s speeding or horn is not a fault line on your report — dealing with it late or sharply is.
“I took a wrong turning.”
Not a fault. The examiner will help you get back on the route.
“I drove too slowly and got marked for it.”
Undue hesitation is graded like anything else. Not proceeding when it is safe and correct to do so is a driving fault; stopping and waiting when it is safe and reasonable to proceed is a serious one. Speed limits are not target speeds though — reducing speed for a narrow residential street or a busy high street is not a fault.
“Why did the same mistake pass last time and fail this time?”
Because the grade is set by the extent of the deviation and the circumstances at that moment, not by the manoeuvre’s name. A misjudged gap that causes no one any trouble is a driving fault. The same misjudgement that makes another driver brake heavily is a serious one.
Your result, and what to do with it
At the end the examiner tells you what faults you made, either way. The email you receive after the test lists every driving, serious and dangerous fault recorded, under those same headings — take it to your instructor rather than trying to reconstruct the drive from memory.
If you did not pass, the next test must be at least 10 working days away and you pay the fee again: £62 on a weekday, £75 for evenings, weekends and bank holidays.
An appeal is a narrow route. You can appeal only if you can prove the examiner did not follow the law, and the result itself cannot be changed — a successful appeal might get you a refund or a free retest. The window is 6 months in England and Wales, 21 days in Scotland.
The theory-test side of the same question
Different test, different arithmetic. The theory test is scored, not fault-marked: 43 out of 50 on the multiple choice and 44 out of 75 on hazard perception, both in one sitting. There is no equivalent of a serious fault, and no equivalent of a 15-mistake allowance.
If you are still working towards it, run a full mock theory test against the real timer and work through the 14 DVSA topics. It is free to get started.
Sources
- GOV.UK — Driving test: cars — driving test faults and your result
- GOV.UK — Driving test: cars — what happens during the test
- DVSA — DT1 examiner guidance: guide to assessment and marking
- DVSA — DT1 examiner guidance: finding and recording faults on the digital test report
- DVSA — Top 10 reasons for failing the driving test in Great Britain
- DVSA — Understanding your driving test result: car driving test
- GOV.UK — Driving test cost
- GOV.UK — Theory test: pass mark and test result
- DVSA — Driving test and theory test data: cars (tables DRT121E, DRT121F)
GOV.UK and DVSA excerpts are reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0.