Learner Drivers Are Paying Touts Up to £500 for a DVSA Test Slot

Nearly one in three learner drivers has now paid a third-party booking service up to £500 to secure a practical test slot, according to a National Audit Office investigation into the DVSA’s driving test backlog, a sum on top of the standard test fee itself. The watchdog found the agency will not hit its own target waiting time until the end of 2027, two years later than the DVSA’s own 2024 plan promised, leaving a gap that a resale market has stepped in to exploit.

The DVSA test fee itself is £62 on weekdays and £75 at evenings and weekends. Paying a booking bot hundreds of pounds on top of that fee, just to get an appointment months sooner than the official system offers, has become normal for learners in the areas hit hardest by the backlog. For a family already covering the cost of lessons, insurance and a car, an extra £500 simply to sit the test on a workable date is a bill that falls hardest on households already stretched by the cost of learning to drive at all.

How bad the backlog actually is

The average wait for a practical car test was 22 weeks as of September 2025, up from just over five weeks in early 2020, a gap of more than four months added to the time it takes a learner to go from ready-to-test to holding a full licence. Seventy per cent of DVSA test centres are now operating at the maximum permitted waiting time of 24 weeks, effectively the system’s ceiling. The DVSA set out a recovery plan in 2024 promising to bring waits down to seven weeks by the end of 2025. The National Audit Office concluded that target will not be met until November 2027 at the earliest.

The root of the problem dates back to the pandemic, when lockdowns meant around 1.1 million driving tests could not go ahead in the 2020-21 financial year. Most of those learners have gone on to rebook, but the National Audit Office estimates roughly 360,000 postponed tests are still working their way through the system, five years after the disruption that caused them.

Waiting times are not spread evenly. Learners in large towns and cities face the longest queues, where test centre capacity has not kept pace with population growth or with the surge in demand that followed the pandemic disruption. Rural and smaller test centres tend to have shorter waits, which is why some learners now travel considerable distances, sometimes past several closer centres, purely to sit a test months earlier than their local centre can offer. That workaround costs time and fuel that many learners, already stretched by lesson costs running to £35 to £45 an hour in most regions, can ill afford.

The resale racket the DVSA has failed to shut down

The DVSA’s own booking system is meant to release new test slots at set times, on a first-come, first-served basis, free of charge beyond the standard test fee. In practice, automated bots snap up large blocks of newly released slots within seconds, then list them for resale through business accounts and unofficial websites at a significant markup. Learners desperate to sit their test before an upcoming house move, job start date or insurance renewal are left choosing between an official wait of many months or paying a reseller who has effectively queue-jumped the entire system.

The DVSA closed 880 business accounts between January and September 2025 for breaching the booking system’s terms and conditions, a figure that gives some sense of the scale of the resale operation running alongside the official system. Closing accounts has not stopped the practice. New accounts replace closed ones, and the underlying shortage of test slots means demand for any route around the queue remains intense regardless of how many resellers get shut down.

Driving instructor bodies have pressed the DVSA to introduce identity checks and limits on how many test slots a single account can hold at once, arguing that the current system makes it too easy for a handful of operators to control access to appointments that should be shared out strictly on a first-come, first-served basis, exactly as the DVSA’s own rules claim they are. So far, account closures remain the DVSA’s main response, and the agency has not published a timeline for structural changes to the booking platform itself.

Why the DVSA cannot simply hire its way out

The agency has run multiple recruitment drives for driving examiners over several years without appointing enough new staff to meaningfully cut the backlog, a pattern the National Audit Office has flagged repeatedly without seeing it corrected. Examiner exit rates remain high, and the National Audit Office links this to perceived uncompetitive pay set against the pressures of the job, including responsibility for public safety decisions on every test and, examiners report, a rising volume of aggressive behaviour from candidates and their families after a failed result.

That combination, a shrinking pool of examiners and a test slot resale market absorbing much of the capacity that does exist, means a learner’s realistic chance of testing quickly now depends heavily on whether they are willing and able to pay for a shortcut, rather than on how ready they are to drive.

The knock-on effects reach well past the test centre itself. Learners stuck waiting months for a slot often keep paying for lessons in the meantime simply to avoid losing the skills they have built up, adding hundreds of pounds to the overall cost of learning to drive before they ever sit the test. Instructors report pupils who are ready to pass sitting idle for months, taking up diary slots that could otherwise go to newer learners, which compounds the instructor shortage separately documented across the driving tuition industry. Insurers, too, factor lengthy provisional-licence periods into some quotes, meaning a longer wait for a test can translate directly into a higher first-year insurance premium once a new driver eventually passes.

How to fight back

• Book and manage your test only through the official gov.uk booking service, never through a third-party website or app that charges a premium above the standard fee. Do not pay a third party for a test slot; this both funds the resale market and puts your personal and payment details through an unofficial reseller with no accountability if something goes wrong.
• Use the DVSA’s official “Test Cancellations” checker regularly, or a free, non-paid cancellation alert tool, rather than a paid bot service, to catch slots cancelled by other candidates closer to your preferred date.
• Report any site or account offering to sell you a test slot directly to the DVSA. The agency relies partly on these reports to identify and close resale accounts.
• If the DVSA cancels your booked test with fewer than three working days’ notice for a reason other than weather, you are entitled to a refund of reasonable costs, including lesson fees and hire car charges booked for the test slot. Claims must be submitted within fourteen days with receipts attached.
• If you are close to test-ready, book the earliest slot available even if it is at an unfamiliar test centre some distance away, then use official cancellation checking to move to a closer centre later if a slot appears.

Until examiner numbers recover and the backlog clears, the honest route through the system will keep losing out to the resale market it was never designed to withstand. For now, the surest protection against paying over the odds is persistence with the official channels rather than a shortcut that hands more money, and more personal data, to an unregulated reseller.

Sources:

• National Audit Office, Investigation into car driving test waiting times
• National Audit Office press release, December 2025
• GOV.UK, official driving test booking service