Birmingham (South Yardley) test centre: 42.8% pass rate, £462 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Birmingham (South Yardley) conducted 14,471 car practical tests and issued 6,199 passes. The resulting 42.8% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 277th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 20th of 26 in West Midlands.

That is 7.2 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 3.4 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 42.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.33 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Birmingham (South Yardley) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.33 times, or £145. Add 1.33 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 £318. The test cycle at Birmingham (South Yardley) is therefore about £462. Testing here therefore costs about £100 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 (South Yardley) ran to a median 10 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.9 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.33 expected retakes that is roughly 13.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 4,783 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.5% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 6,393 candidates sat their first test at Birmingham (South Yardley) and 2,592 passed, 40.5%, which is 2.3 points below the all-attempts rate. 97 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.52% 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 (South Yardley) has risen by 6.1 points, from 36.7% to 42.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,890 to 14,471 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £116 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 45.4% and female candidates at 38.4%, a gap of 7.0 points across 9,104 and 5,367 tests. Automatic tests made up 30.1% of the workload and passed at 37.8%, 5.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 38.8% in March 2026 to 48.5% in August 2025, a 9.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in West Midlands, Warwick (Wedgenock House) runs 5.7 points higher at 48.5%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £82 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.