How Driving Instructor Test Fees Rose a Third in Five Years While DVSA’s Own Checks Collapsed 94 Percent

Driving instructors and learner drivers have paid the DVSA a third more in test and licence fees over the past five years, while one of the agency’s own quality checks on instructors collapsed by more than 94 percent over the same period, according to a Freedom of Information request by the Driving Instructors Association.

The FOI request asked the DVSA for total annual revenue generated from Approved Driving Instructor and Potential Driving Instructor services, covering qualifying test fees, licence fees and other charges. The response shows revenue rose from £7,667,808.83 in 2021/22 to £10,153,445.55 in 2025/26, a rise of roughly a third in five years. Over the same period, delivery of Standards Checks, the periodic assessment that confirms a working instructor still meets DVSA’s teaching standard, fell from more than 12,000 a year immediately before the pandemic to fewer than 700 in 2025/26.

Rising Fees, Falling Service

The Driving Instructors Association’s analysis of the DVSA’s newly published 2025-26 Annual Report sets out a wider pattern behind the headline fee figures. National waiting times for practical driving tests fell only marginally over the year, from 21.9 weeks to 21.5 weeks, against an official target of seven weeks that the report itself now lists as having no date set for achievement. Yet the DVSA delivered 2.169 million practical tests against a target of 1.975 million, roughly 200,000 more tests than planned, showing that added volume alone is not closing the gap between demand and capacity.

Instructor satisfaction with the DVSA fell to 42 percent against a 60 percent target, down from 47 percent the previous year, making it the one measure in the report moving in the wrong direction while candidate satisfaction improved. The report attributes high first attempt test failure rates, running at around 50 percent, to learners testing before they are ready, but its own risk register separately cites examiner capacity and booking system abuse as contributing factors, a tension the Driving Instructors Association argues looks more like deflection than a full account of the problem.

Examiner numbers grew by a net 188 over the year, which the DVSA presents as evidence of investment in capacity. The Driving Instructors Association’s analysis notes this falls well short of the scale needed to close a national shortfall measured in the hundreds of thousands of tests. The agency’s own estimate is that 450,000 to 500,000 extra tests are still required to bring waiting times down, with roughly 18 months needed to clear the existing backlog at current delivery rates.

The Booking System DVSA Itself Calls High Risk

The legacy Testing and Registration System that runs driving test bookings is rated a very high risk in the DVSA’s own annual report, a rating tied to security and operational limitations that have been known for years. Its promised replacement remains at Beta stage with no delivery date given, leaving instructors and learners dependent on a system the regulator itself will not vouch for.

The financial pressure on the agency is real. The DVSA recorded a net expenditure deficit of £86.6 million for the year, and fees, frozen for more than 15 years for ordinary practical tests, are now under active review with the Department for Transport and the Treasury. The stated aim of that review is to make fee income cover costs, which in practice points toward further fee rises landing on instructors and learners rather than on general taxation. Compensation for DVSA short notice cancellations, which totalled £654,000 across 6,789 cancelled tests in the year, is paid to candidates only. Instructors whose diaries are disrupted by a cancelled test slot absorb that loss with no compensation at all.

The Approved Driving Instructor pipeline is also under growing strain. The national register now stands at more than 44,000 qualified instructors plus 5,500 trainees, with more than 20,000 new applications received, the highest level of interest recorded before the pandemic began. Yet more than 1,000 appeals were lodged against refused or revoked trainee licences in the same year, and delivery of Part 2 and Part 3 qualifying tests for new instructors, not just Standards Checks for working instructors, has continued to fall behind demand.

A Fee Structure Under Active Review Right Now

The timing of the Driving Instructors Association’s FOI disclosure gives the figures a sharper edge. DVSA test fees are not a settled matter sitting quietly in the background. The Department for Transport and the Treasury are actively reviewing them at the same time this data was published, with the stated goal of making fee income cover the full cost of running the service. Against an £86.6 million net expenditure deficit for the year, that review points firmly toward higher fees landing on instructors and learners, rather than toward the Treasury covering the shortfall through general taxation. A fee structure frozen for more than 15 years is unlikely to stay frozen through a review explicitly built around closing a deficit of this size.

The instructor at the centre of the Driving Instructors Association’s analysis raised a further point about how DVSA measures its own performance, one that goes beyond the headline waiting time figure. The published waiting time measure is based on the earliest week in which at least 10 percent of appointments remain available, and it is capped at 24 weeks regardless of how much longer the true wait might run in a specific area. This means the national 21.5 week average does not represent the median wait experienced by an individual learner, and it says nothing about how long a learner actually waits between first attempting to book and finally sitting a test, a gap that instructors report can run considerably longer than the headline figure suggests.

DVSA’s own report also states that 100 percent of Freedom of Information requests were answered within the statutory 20 working day window, a claim the Driving Instructors Association’s analysis flags as impossible to verify from the report alone, as no denominator, methodology or breakdown of exclusions is provided alongside it. Set against an internal audit opinion of only moderate assurance, with Knowledge and Information Management specifically flagged as an area of limited management assurance, the analysis argues DVSA’s own governance language claims a stronger position than the underlying evidence in its own report actually supports.

What You Can Do

If you are learning to drive, book your test as early as your instructor considers you realistically ready. Waiting lists mean a delay of even a few weeks in booking can add months to your actual test date once local capacity is accounted for.

Check the real waiting time at your specific local test centre before booking, rather than relying on the national average, as centre by centre variation is significant and the DVSA’s own reporting does not publish it, so ask your instructor which nearby centres currently have shorter queues.

If a test you booked is cancelled by the DVSA at short notice, claim the compensation you are entitled to as a candidate, covering costs such as hire vehicle fees, travel and lost earnings, through DVSA’s formal expenses claims process, and submit your claim within six months of the cancelled date.

If you are a working or trainee instructor affected by Standards Check delays, booking system failures or a refused licence, the Driving Instructors Association and other trade bodies can advise on the appeals process and represent instructor concerns directly to the DVSA and the Department for Transport.

Respond to the DVSA’s fee review while it remains open. The agency has stated the review’s direction is toward fees covering costs in full, and public and trade body input at this stage has a real chance of shaping where any increase falls. For more on driving test capacity pressures, see our report on why some driving test centres have waits five times longer than others.

Sources:

• Driving Instructors Association: Analysis of the DVSA Annual Report 2025-2026
• GOV.UK: Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency