Map shows best and worst places to book driving test as backlog won't clear until 2027
The average waiting time to secure a driving test in Great Britain stood at around 22 weeks in September 2025, and 70% of permanent test centres were operating at the maximum 24-week limit, according to a new National Audit Office (NAO) report.
The NAO’s analysis found waiting times were more than four times higher than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused 1.1 million tests to be cancelled and millions more delayed.
While the DVSA has increased the number of tests delivered and introduced new measures to try to ease waits, it estimates waiting times won’t return to a target average of seven weeks until at least November 2027 - two years later than an original end-of-2025 goal.
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The NAO says this long-running issue is being compounded by several systemic problems:
- Examiner shortages: Despite repeated recruitment drives, the DVSA has only added around 83 new examiners since 2021 - far short of its target of 400 - leaving test capacity constrained.
- Bots booking slots: Automated programmes continue to take up available slots, making it harder for genuine learners to find tests at reasonable times and pushing people to book via third party websites.
- Third-party resale sites: Because learners are booking their tests far in advance to reduce their delays, they aren’t always ready when their date comes around. Therefore many are using resale sites to sell their slots. Bots snapping up the slots may also mean more are being sold on third party websites. Around a third of learner drivers reported using third-party services to book tests, sometimes paying up to £500, compared with the DVSA’s official fee of £62.
Delayed tests are more than just an inconvenience. About 30 % of learner drivers surveyed said they need a licence for work - meaning long waits can directly affect job opportunities and productivity.
Some learners are driving hundreds of miles to test centres with earlier slots, adding travel costs and stress to an already fraught process. Learner drivers from as far away as London and south Wales are booking driving tests in Inverness in northern Scotland to try and beat the backlog, the BBC reported.
How to book a driving test
The DVSA releases the majority of driving test slots on Monday mornings at 6am, with additional test slots released throughout the week.
Users can book an available test up to 24 weeks in advance, either online or by telephoning DVSA’s customer service centre.
Worst places for driving test waiting times
This map from the NOA highlights just how severe the driving test shortage is. As of September 2025, only 73 out of 240 permanent test centres have a waiting time below 24 weeks.
The worst areas for demand are the big cities with all of London’s centres at 17-24 weeks and above. But these waiting times are now spreading further out from the cities into surrounding boroughs and beyond.
In fact most of the test centres in Scotland, the North West, Yorkshire and the North East appear to be at maximum capacity.
Best places for driving test waiting times
The NOA’s investigation does not identify individual test centres by name, but we have cross referenced it with other maps of UK test centres.
We can confidently see these areas highlighted as having waiting times of 0-6 weeks during the NOA's investigations in September 2025:
- Monmouth, Wales
- Tunbridge Wells, Kent
- Letchworth, Hertfordshire
- Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
- Grantham, Lincolnshire
- Rugby, Warwickshire
- Dumfries, Scotland
What the NAO recommends
To combat rising waiting times, DVSA published a seven-point plan in December 2024 with a target to reduce waiting times to seven weeks by December 2025. But the NAO found the DVSA is actually carrying out fewer tests.
In 2024/25, it provided 1.96 million tests and conducted 1.83 million of them. This is compared to 2023-24 when it provided 2.07 million driving tests, and conducted 1.94 million of them.
The watchdog has urged both the DVSA and the Department for Transport (DfT) to take decisive action to restore the service to acceptable standards. Key recommendations include:
- Assessing and responding to genuine demand more effectively.
- Rapidly scaling up examiner recruitment to increase test capacity.
- Improving governance between the DVSA and the Department for Transport to better handle booking system abuses and future challenges.
In its conclusion, the NAO’s investigation said: “The failure over nearly five years to resolve the problem of long waiting times for car practical driving tests has exposed underlying issues at DVSA.
“Its system for booking tests is not working well for learner drivers. It has not been able to recruit and retain enough examiners to increase capacity, and its operational forecasting did not identify the underlying causes and sustained nature of the increases in demand, other than that relating to the pandemic backlog.
“Consequently, DVSA has been unable to adapt at pace or to recover from the pandemic, and this has undermined engagement of the workforce and external stakeholders’ confidence in DVSA.
“Learner drivers in particular have suffered in terms of long waits and having to pay third parties to obtain access to a public service.”
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