Ashfield test centre: 57.3% pass rate, £286 to get through it.

Ashfield is a high-volume centre, putting 8,144 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 4,666 passed, so the centre finished the year on 57.3% and 73rd of 308 nationally, 5th of 20 within East Midlands.

That is 7.3 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.5 points above the 50.8% East Midlands average. A centre in this band is usually working quieter road layouts with fewer forced lane decisions, not a softer marking standard: the DVSA marking sheet is national.

Turn 57.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.75 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Ashfield pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.75 times, or £108. Add 0.75 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £177. The test cycle at Ashfield is therefore about £286. Testing here therefore saves about £76 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Ashfield. DVSA recorded a median wait of 18.2 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 6.3 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.75 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 13.6 extra weeks of waiting, close to 3 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 2,797 standard slots inside the booking window here and 8.5% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 4,283 first attempts at Ashfield, 2,535 passed, a rate of 59.2%, which is 1.9 points above the all-attempts figure. 248 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.79% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Ashfield has fallen by 1.8 points, from 59.1% to 57.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,319 to 8,144 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £16 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 58.4% and female candidates at 56.1%, a gap of 2.4 points across 4,192 and 3,952 tests. Automatic tests made up 24.6% of the workload and passed at 49.5%, 7.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 53.2% in April 2025 to 60.6% in June 2025, a 7.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Ashfield on pass rate, so travelling elsewhere is unlikely to pay for itself once you add an unfamiliar route, the travel and the settling-in lessons. The cheaper lever here is preparation on the roads your instructor already knows.