Birmingham (Garretts Green) test centre: 44.4% pass rate, £438 to get through it.

22,480 candidates took the car practical test at Birmingham (Garretts Green) during 2025/26 and 9,980 of them passed, a pass rate of 44.4%. That is one of the busiest centres in Great Britain, ranked 268th of 308 on pass rate, and 19th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That is 5.6 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 1.8 points below the 46.2% average for West Midlands. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 44.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.25 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Birmingham (Garretts Green) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.25 times, or £140. Add 1.25 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the West Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £298. The test cycle at Birmingham (Garretts Green) is therefore about £438. Testing here therefore costs about £76 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Birmingham (Garretts Green) was 7 weeks in July 2026, 4.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.25 expected retakes add only around 8.8 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 8,720 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.8% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 9,212 candidates sat their first test at Birmingham (Garretts Green) and 3,867 passed, 42.0%, which is 2.4 points below the all-attempts rate. 139 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.51% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Birmingham (Garretts Green) has risen by 3.1 points, from 41.3% to 44.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 11,486 to 22,480 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £51 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 46.9% and female candidates at 40.7%, a gap of 6.2 points across 13,402 and 9,078 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.4% of the workload and passed at 41.0%, 3.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 41.5% in December 2025 to 48.1% in September 2025, a 6.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in West Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Birmingham (Garretts Green) 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.