Bredbury (Manchester) test centre: 56.0% pass rate, £287 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Bredbury (Manchester) conducted 10,636 car practical tests and issued 5,953 passes. The resulting 56.0% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 91st of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 9th of 31 in North West.

That is 5.9 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 7.0 points above the 49.0% North West 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 56.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.79 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bredbury (Manchester) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.79 times, or £111. Add 0.79 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £176. The test cycle at Bredbury (Manchester) is therefore about £287. Testing here therefore saves about £61 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Bredbury (Manchester) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 17.1 weeks in July 2026, 5.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.79 expected retakes that is about 13.5 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,582 standard slots inside the booking window here and 2.8% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 5,536 first attempts at Bredbury (Manchester), 3,207 passed, a rate of 57.9%, which is 2.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 290 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.24% 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 Bredbury (Manchester) has risen by 2.4 points, from 53.6% to 56.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,517 to 10,636 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £23 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Bredbury (Manchester), 55.9% against 56.1%. Automatic tests made up 24.9% of the workload and passed at 47.6%, 8.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 52.1% in September 2025 to 59.5% in July 2025, a 7.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in North West runs more than five points ahead of Bredbury (Manchester) 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.