Busiest driving test centres in South East, 2025/26

30 test centres in South East ranked by car tests conducted in 2025/26, busiest first. They ran 230,858 tests between them, 12% of the Great Britain total. Gillingham was the busiest in the region with 14,886, roughly 60 a working day.

All regions East Midlands East of England London North East North West Scotland South East South West Wales West Midlands Yorkshire and The Humber

#	Test centre	Region	Tests a year	Pass rate	Median wait
1	Gillingham	South East	14,886	56.4%	9.9 wks
2	Portsmouth	South East	13,518	52.8%	13 wks
3	Crawley	South East	11,305	42.7%	10.4 wks
4	Burgess Hill	South East	11,237	45.5%	14.9 wks
5	Herne Bay	South East	10,674	55.9%	7 wks
6	Slough (London)	South East	10,509	50.8%	6 wks
7	Farnborough	South East	10,482	59.7%	16 wks
8	Southampton (Maybush)	South East	10,480	50.3%	13.1 wks
9	Bletchley	South East	9,415	51.5%	14.6 wks
10	Reading	South East	9,237	55.4%	13.9 wks
11	Chertsey (London)	South East	9,082	52.9%	15.6 wks
12	Banbury	South East	9,069	41.3%	18.1 wks
13	Lee On The Solent	South East	8,502	63.2%	20 wks
14	Maidstone	South East	8,053	60.2%	10 wks
15	Folkestone	South East	7,818	42.4%	7.9 wks
16	Sevenoaks	South East	6,740	59.0%	10.4 wks
17	Chichester	South East	6,672	61.6%	4.7 wks
18	Eastbourne	South East	6,031	55.4%	13.7 wks
19	Tunbridge Wells	South East	5,726	64.5%	10 wks
20	Ashford (Kent)	South East	5,475	46.2%	6.3 wks
21	Oxford (Cowley)	South East	5,419	50.6%	5 wks
22	Redhill Aerodrome	South East	5,408	53.9%	10 wks
23	Aylesbury	South East	5,255	49.3%	5 wks
24	Basingstoke	South East	5,009	56.8%	19.6 wks
25	Canterbury	South East	4,670	45.8%	5.3 wks
26	Winchester	South East	4,602	52.2%	7.1 wks
27	Guildford	South East	4,542	57.1%	9.6 wks
28	Hastings (Ore)	South East	3,892	52.4%	17.1 wks
29	Newport (Isle Of Wight)	South East	3,616	54.1%	8.9 wks
30	High Wycombe	South East	3,534	51.5%	4.6 wks

What test volume tells you

A centre’s size is set by how many examiners work there and how many test slots they run each day, not by how many people want to book. Demand is what varies, so a busy centre is not automatically a slow one: it may simply be a large site serving a large city. In August 2026 the busiest quarter of centres had a median wait of 11.1 weeks and the quietest quarter 15.6 weeks, so volume on its own is a poor guide to how long you will wait. What does move the wait is a mismatch between a centre’s capacity and its catchment, which is why two neighbouring centres can differ by months.

Volume matters more for reading the pass rate. A rate calculated from a few thousand tests is stable, and a change of two or three points between years is a real change. A rate from a few hundred is not. At 200 tests a year the 95% margin around a published rate is roughly 7 points either way, from sampling alone. The quietest centre in this table, Isles of Scilly, ran 8 tests in the whole year. That is why our pass rate table drops centres under 100 tests altogether. If you are comparing a small rural centre with a large urban one, treat a few points as noise and look at several years instead.

Every centre in the country is on the national volume table, and addresses, waiting times and route notes for these centres are in the South East test centre directory.