UK theory test pass rate

The UK car driving theory test pass rate for April 2025 to March 2026 was 44.8% — meaning fewer than half of sittings result in a pass. (DVSA's figure aggregates first attempts and retakes; it does not split first-time candidates from those re-sitting after a fail.) The rate has fallen just over 20 points from 65.4% in 2007/08 and has settled in the mid-40s since 2022/23.

These figures cover the car theory test only. DVSA publishes separate series for the motorcycle, lorry and bus and ADI Part 1 tests, each with its own format and pass mark.

Car theory test and driving test volumes and pass rates for Great Britain overall and for each test centre.

Latest annual pass rate

Six-year trend (2020-21 → 2025-26)

The pandemic spike of 2020-21 is the standout feature of the recent decade: with test centres closed for long stretches, learners had unprecedented time to revise, and the pass rate jumped around 8 points above the pre-pandemic baseline of the late 2010s. The decline back through 2021-22 and 2022-23 is the return to normal, not a sign of a harder test.

• 2020-21 55.7%
• 2021-22 50.1%
• 2022-23 44.2%
• 2023-24 45.2%
• 2024-25 44.9%
• 2025-26 44.8%

Pre-pandemic, the rate had been drifting downward for over a decade — from 65.4% in 2007-08 to the high 40s by the late 2010s. That longer fall is the part people actually argue about, and the quarterly record shows it happened in two steps rather than as a slow drift: why the pass rate fell from 65% to 45% takes the full series apart.

Pass rate by gender (April 2025 – March 2026)

Female candidates have consistently outperformed male candidates. The gap has held at roughly 3–4 percentage points across the last decade; it was wider (5–6 points) in the late 2000s and has narrowed since then.

Pass rate by age

Learners who start in their late twenties, thirties or forties get told they have left it too late. DVSA records every sitting against the candidate’s age in table DRT111C, so the size of the age effect is measurable rather than a matter of opinion — and it is not the shape most people assume.

Everything except “60 and over” is grouped here from DVSA’s single-year figures, and the rows add up to the published annual total of 2,924,430 sittings (DRT111C’s age rows total 1,311,341 passes against DRT111A’s 1,311,480 — a 139-pass difference between the two DVSA tables). The top of the range arrives pre-grouped:

Some age groups with small numbers of tests have been combined to prevent data from being linked to an individual.

Sixteen-year-olds appear at all because you can take the theory test from your 16th birthday if you get, or have applied for, the higher weekly rate of the mobility part of Personal Independence Payment. Everyone else starts from their 17th birthday.

Three things fall out of the table, and only the first is the one people expect.

• Seventeen is the outlier — not later life. Seventeen-year-olds pass just over half their sittings (51.1%), more than four points clear of the next-best band and six points above the all-ages rate. They are also the single biggest group on the table by a distance: 694,029 sittings, 23.7% of every car theory test taken in Great Britain that year.
• The sharpest fall in the table is one birthday wide. At 17 the rate is 51.1%; at 18 it is 40.1%. That 10.9-point step is the biggest single-year change anywhere between 17 and 59, and about five times larger than any other single-year fall in that range.
• From 20 onwards the decline is real, but gentle. 46.5% at 20–24, 43.6% at 25–29, 42.4% at 30–39, 38.8% at 40–49. Sitting the test in your thirties runs about 2.4 percentage points below the all-ages rate. The 60-and-over band, at 38.5%, is ahead of 50–59 on 36.8%.

Two cautions before reading too much into a single row. The table counts tests, not people — someone who sits three times appears three times, so a band’s figure is how often sittings in that band succeed, not one candidate’s odds. And the bands are nothing like the same size: 30–39 covers over half a million sittings while 60 and over covers 8,262, so the small bands swing much further from one release to the next.

None of it changes the exam. The question bank is the same at every age, and so are the thresholds — 43 out of 50 on multiple choice and 44 out of 75 on hazard perception. Work through the 14 syllabus topics first, then move to full mock tests.

Pass rate by region (recent annual figures)

Scotland has the highest theory test pass rate in Great Britain. The per-nation split above is computed by averaging the rate at each centre — small rural centres count the same as big-city ones, which widens the gap between Scotland and Wales. Weighting by the number of tests at each centre puts Scotland closer to the GB average and Wales a couple of points below it.

Best and worst test centres

Pass rates vary considerably by test centre — partly driven by population mix and partly by the proportion of repeat candidates. Extremes from the April 2024 – March 2025 DVSA centre-level data:

• Highest by raw rate: Brodick (Isle of Arran) at 64.7% — but on only 51 tests, so volatile. The next handful (Mallaig 61.5%, Kyle of Lochalsh 59.3%, Hornsea 58.1%) all sit on under 100 tests apiece — the rates are real but the small samples make them noisy year-to-year.
• Highest at city-scale volume: Royal Tunbridge Wells at 53.6% (9,724 tests), Guildford 53.6% (16,307), and Cambridge 53.2% (22,974). At ≥5,000 tests the top of the table sits in the low-to-mid 50s, not the 60s — small rural centres distort the headline.
• Lowest: Millom in Cumbria at 34.6% — another tiny sample, 52 tests. The lowest rate at real volume is Bradford, 36.8% across 41,920 tests.

See the full top 10 and bottom 10, the biggest year-on-year movers and a breakdown by nation on our pass rate by test centre page. Use the official centre finder to see what’s near you; everyone takes the same DVSA question bank, so your centre choice does not change what’s actually tested.

Why the pass rate fell from 65% to 45%

The fall is real and it is large: 65.4% in 2007-08, 44.8% in 2025-26 — 20.6 percentage points in eighteen years. What it is not is a steady slide. Two step changes did almost all of the work, and the change most often blamed for it is not one of them.

One caveat before the table. DVSA’s published series starts in April 2007, so 65.4% is the earliest full year on record rather than a proven all-time high.

Car theory tests conducted, passed and pass rates by financial quarter and financial year, Great Britain, from April 2007 to March 2026

Read down the pass rate column and the shape is obvious. Six years in the low-to-mid 60s, a seven-point collapse between 2012-13 and 2013-14, seven years grinding from 51.7% to 47.1%, the pandemic bump, then a second drop to the mid-40s where it has sat ever since.

What changed, and when

DVSA keeps a dated record of every change to the driving test, which makes it possible to line the format up against the numbers instead of guessing.

The number of questions in car and motorcycle theory test changed from 35 to 50 on 3 September 2007 - the pass rate became 43 out of 50.

Which changes actually moved the number

DRT111A is published quarterly as well as annually, so a change with a known date can be checked against the quarters either side of it.

• Growing the test from 35 to 50 questions made it easier to pass, not harder. April to June 2007, the last full quarter of the 35-question test, came in at 62.0%. The first two full quarters of the 50-question test were 67.3% and 69.8% — and 69.8%, in January to March 2008, is still the highest quarterly figure DVSA has ever published for the car theory test. The bigger bank spread the risk of an unlucky question set.
• The first case study barely registered. It went live on 28 September 2009. The quarter it landed in scored 64.9% and the first full quarter after it 62.8%; the year closed at 63.8%, down 1.6 points.
• The second case study lines up with the first genuine step. October to December 2011 came in at 57.5% — down 6.1 points on the quarter before and the first time the series had dropped below 60%.
• Withdrawing the published questions did not produce an immediate drop. The change took effect on 23 January 2012 and that quarter scored 59.5%, up on the 57.5% before it. The second step arrives a full year later: 60.1% in October to December 2012, then 52.3% in January to March 2013 — 7.8 points in a single quarter. Since then, no quarter has reached 54% apart from four inside the pandemic window.
• The later format changes moved it by a point or two at most. The CGI switch of January 2015 sits between 51.0% in 2014-15 and 49.3% in 2015-16. The 2020 video clip cannot be isolated at all: it arrived on 28 September 2020, in a year when centres were shut for months and the rate spiked to 55.7% for reasons that had nothing to do with the format.

As of 23 January, the questions used in real theory tests are no longer exactly the same as the questions published in revision materials such as the Official DSA Theory Test book. The change is designed to ensure learner drivers and riders gain a better understanding of driving theory rather than just learning by rote which options are correct for individual questions.

That last one is the interesting result. The obvious story — “they stopped publishing the answers and everyone started failing” — does not survive contact with the quarterly data, because the rate held up for four quarters afterwards. What it does fit is a slower mechanism: a bank that diverges from the published revision questions a little more with every refresh, so rote learning decays rather than dying overnight.

Harder test, or less-prepared candidates?

Both readings are partly true and neither is provable from these tables. Three things are worth holding on to before picking a side.

• The figure counts sittings, not people. Someone who sits five times before passing contributes four fails and one pass. The more repeat sittings there are, the lower the headline rate goes without any individual candidate being worse prepared.
• Volumes have more than doubled. 1,451,348 sittings in 2007-08 against 2,924,430 in 2025-26 — 101% more. DVSA publishes an attempt-number breakdown for the practical test but not for the theory test, so how much of that growth is repeat attempts cannot be read off the published tables.
• The threshold has not moved since 2007. It has been 43 out of 50 and 44 out of 75 for the whole of the decline. What changed is what sits behind the questions, not how many you are allowed to get wrong.

The pass rate is not the same as the pass mark. The mark is the threshold a single candidate has to clear; the rate is how often candidates actually clear it. For a deep dive on the threshold, see the pass mark guide; for what has changed in the Code the questions are drawn from, see recent Highway Code changes.

How to be in the 44.8%

1. Practise by syllabus topic before you take full mocks. The DVSA test covers 14 syllabus topics — work through them in order, then start mock tests.
2. Score 47/50 or above in practice consistently. Real-exam nerves cost a few marks; 43/50 in practice is too close to the line.
3. Practise hazard perception separately. The click-timing skill is different from multiple-choice recall — see our hazard perception explainer.
4. Don’t chase a “good week”. Quarter-to-quarter variation in the GB pass rate is small — around two percentage points across recent years. Pick the date that works for your revision plan rather than gaming the calendar.
5. Book early, then keep revising. A booked date gives you a fixed deadline to revise towards, which beats an open-ended plan.

How DVSA publishes the data

DVSA publishes theory test statistics on gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/driving-test-and-theory-test-data-cars. Tables of interest:

• DRT111A — Quarterly and annual pass rates for Great Britain
• DRT111B — Monthly / quarterly / annual pass rates by gender
• DRT111C — Annual breakdown by gender and age (the source for the by-age table above)
• DRT112A — Pass rates by gender and month at each test centre

Tables are .ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet). The per-centre breakdown on this site is drawn from the April 2024 – March 2025 figures in the annual centre-level table ( DRT112A ). DRT111A and DRT111B refresh quarterly — last on 25 June 2026 — while DRT112A and DRT111C refresh annually, both last on 17 July 2026, each with data to March 2026. The headline, gender and age figures on this page are drawn from April 2025 to March 2026; the nation and test-centre breakdowns still come from the 2024-25 centre-level table and move to the new period when it is next rebuilt here.

Sources

• GOV.UK — Driving test and theory test data: cars (DVSA quarterly tables)
• GOV.UK — Driver and rider testing and instructor statistics: April 2023 to March 2024
• DVSA — DRT111C — car theory tests conducted, passed and pass rates by financial year, gender and age: Great Britain (.ods, the source for the by-age table)
• DVSA — DRT111A — car theory tests conducted, passed and pass rates by financial quarter and financial year: Great Britain (.ods, the source for the annual and quarterly figures)
• GOV.UK — Theory test: pass mark and result
• GOV.UK — Theory test (overview)
• GOV.UK — History of road safety, The Highway Code and the driving test (the dated record of every change to the test)
• DSA — Despatch, issue 01/2012 — “Theory test questions no longer published”
• The National Archives — DSA press release, 28 September 2009 — “Case studies go ‘live’ in theory test today”
• GOV.UK — Theory test changes: 28 September 2020
• GOV.UK — New theory test questions aim to boost cardiac arrest survival rate
• DVSA — DVSA Annual Report and Accounts 2024–2025

Pass-rate figures reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0.