Birmingham (Kingstanding) test centre: 48.5% pass rate, £380 to get through it.

16,133 candidates took the car practical test at Birmingham (Kingstanding) during 2025/26 and 7,829 of them passed, a pass rate of 48.5%. That is one of the busiest centres in Great Britain, ranked 215th of 308 on pass rate, and 14th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That lands within 1.5 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.3 points above the 46.2% West Midlands average, which makes Birmingham (Kingstanding) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.06 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Birmingham (Kingstanding) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.06 times, or £128. Add 1.06 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 £252. The test cycle at Birmingham (Kingstanding) is therefore about £380. Testing here therefore costs about £18 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.

The queue is the expensive part at Birmingham (Kingstanding). DVSA recorded a median wait of 23 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.06 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 24.4 extra weeks of waiting, close to 6 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 4,852 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.3% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 8,099 candidates sat their first test at Birmingham (Kingstanding) and 3,820 passed, 47.2%, which is 1.4 points below the all-attempts rate. 192 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.37% 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 (Kingstanding) has risen by 12.6 points, from 35.9% to 48.5%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 11,132 to 16,133 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £218 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 51.7% and female candidates at 45.5%, a gap of 6.2 points across 7,893 and 8,240 tests. Automatic tests made up 37.3% of the workload and passed at 45.3%, 3.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 46.2% in June 2025 to 52.4% in January 2026, a 6.2-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 (Kingstanding) 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.