Birmingham (Kings Heath) test centre: 46.8% pass rate, £404 to get through it.

9,072 candidates took the car practical test at Birmingham (Kings Heath) during 2025/26 and 4,242 of them passed, a pass rate of 46.8%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 241st of 308 on pass rate, and 16th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That is 3.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 0.6 points above 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 46.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.14 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Birmingham (Kings Heath) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.14 times, or £133. Add 1.14 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 £271. The test cycle at Birmingham (Kings Heath) is therefore about £404. Testing here therefore costs about £42 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.

Waiting time at Birmingham (Kings Heath) ran to a median 11.7 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.2 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.14 expected retakes that is roughly 13.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,578 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.2% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 4,394 candidates sat their first test at Birmingham (Kings Heath) and 2,005 passed, 45.6%, which is 1.1 points below the all-attempts rate. 56 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.27% 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 (Kings Heath) has risen by 7.7 points, from 39.1% to 46.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,487 to 9,072 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £126 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 47.6% and female candidates at 45.7%, a gap of 1.9 points across 5,199 and 3,873 tests. Automatic tests made up 35.2% of the workload and passed at 44.8%, 2.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 42.8% in July 2025 to 51.6% in February 2026, a 8.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in West Midlands, Birmingham (Shirley) runs 9.8 points higher at 56.6%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £111 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.