If you’ve searched for “official driving test routes” and found conflicting answers, here’s the short version: there’s no such thing anymore.
The DVSA stopped publishing routes in 2010
The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) used to publish the exact routes used at each test centre. They stopped doing this deliberately, specifically so learners couldn’t memorise a route and drive it well without actually being ready to drive anywhere else. Since then, your examiner picks from a number of possible routes on the day, and none of them are published anywhere by the DVSA itself.
So where do routes like ours come from?
Every driving test route you’ll find online — including the ones on this site — is a third-party reconstruction. They’re typically built from:
- Instructors and learners noting down routes they’ve actually driven or observed on test day.
- Local knowledge of the roads near a test centre that examiners are known to favour (dual carriageways, roundabouts, residential areas — the kinds of road types the test is designed to cover).
We take that reference information, turn it into a real, drivable loop, and check it against actual road data to make sure it makes sense as a route — no obvious backtracking, no missing a major road it’s supposed to include, and so on. But it’s still a reconstruction, not a leak of a real document.
What this means for you
Treat every route on this site (and anywhere else) as indicative, not guaranteed:
- It’s a genuinely useful way to get comfortable with the kinds of roads, junctions, and manoeuvres near your test centre.
- It is very unlikely to be the exact route your examiner picks on the day.
- The best use of a practice route is building general confidence on local roads, not memorising a script.
Browse test centres to find practice routes near you.