Female driving test pass rates better than males except for Derry, Coleraine and Larne
Female driving test pass rates are now exceeding males for practical car driving tests except for a small number of test centres including Altnagelvin in Derry.
The four-quarter rolling average puts the pass rate for males at Altnagelvin at 50.3 per cent, slightly above the rate for females, which is 48.2 per cent. The overall pass rate in Derry is estimated at 49.3 per cent.
This bucks the trend across the North where the four-quarter rolling average pass rate for females is 53 per cent and that for males 52.8 per cent. For both sexes the figure is 52.9 per cent.
"Only three test centres had higher pass rates for males than females, which were Coleraine, Larne and Londonderry (Altnagelvin),” a new bulletin from the Department for Infrastructure shows.
The ‘DfI Driver, Vehicle, Operator, and Enforcement Statistics 2025/26 Quarter Three’ report notes that ‘historically to pre-pandemic years, a clear “gender-gap” was apparent in private car driver testing pass-rates, based on a four-quarter rolling average’ but that ‘since driving testing resumed in the summer of 2020, this gap has narrowed considerably and remained much lower throughout 2022/23, to the end of 2023/24 and into the third quarter of 2025/26’.
The analysis shows that female pass rates have now exceeded those of males for the first time with only Derry, Coleraine and Larne recording higher rates for males.
"To the end of December 2025, the rolling four-quarter average car test pass-rate for males was 0.2 percentage points lower than for females, at 52.8 per cent and 53 per cent respectively; this compares with 56.8 per cent and 55.4 per cent to the end of December 2024, and 53.7 per cent and 52.6 per cent to December 2023.
"This is the first time since records were collated that female pass rates have exceeded males for practical car driving tests in a rolling 12-month period and will be interesting to see in future if this will be sustained,” the authors note.
The report outlines that ‘pass-rates for private car testing for females were higher than those for males in 13 testing centres, with the highest percentage point differences in Armagh (67.1 per cent against 61 per cent) and Lisburn (48.8 per cent against 46 per cent)’.