Recorded driving-test fault categories

Maintain progess - speed accounts for 7.5% of recorded faults in April 2025 - March 2026.

serious + dangerous

15.1%

Of everything marked in April 2025 - March 2026 — one of these fails the test outright

top category share

7.5%

Maintain progress - speed

driving (minor) share

84.9%

Only fail you at 16 or more in one test

How faults are marked

Every mark is serious, dangerous, or a driving (minor) fault. Shares of everything marked in April 2025 - March 2026.

  • Serious · 1,657,392
  • Dangerous · 150,495
  • Driving · 10,127,878

Faults that end tests

Top categories by total marks in April 2025 - March 2026. Colour shows severity mix within each bar.

  • Maintain progress - speed892,029
  • Move off - safely841,121
  • Control - steering793,630
  • Maintain progress - undue hesitation758,695
  • Junctions - observation641,173
  • Move off - control574,677
  • Mirrors - change direction481,084
  • Reverse park - Control426,349
Serious Dangerous Driving

Named categories

Raw counts across every severity.

Top 10 fault categories
FaultSeriousDangerousDrivingAll
Maintain progress - speed66,510234825,285892,029
Move off - safely80,9085,259754,954841,121
Control - steering72,24516,345705,040793,630
Maintain progress - undue hesitation46,434260712,001758,695
Junctions - observation186,69934,135420,339641,173
Move off - control48,0904,069522,518574,677
Mirrors - change direction143,02023,707314,357481,084
Reverse park - Control57,7313,284365,334426,349
Mirrors - signalling7,51911397,969405,499
Positioning - normal driving69,9873,195330,251403,433

Recorded fault categories

These are faults recorded, not failed tests or people: more than one fault can be recorded in a test.

Category shares use the published fault-count total for the same financial-year record.

Recorded fault counts describe the available published data and do not predict an individual test result.
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About this data

Fault-category data comes from a Freedom of Information request to the DVSA, recorded per centre and month, as of March 2026. A couple of named-fault labels carry source typos, corrected for display. testcentre.uk is independent and not affiliated with the DVSA. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.