Burton on Trent test centre: 54.7% pass rate, £310 to get through it.

7,273 candidates took the car practical test at Burton on Trent during 2025/26 and 3,981 of them passed, a pass rate of 54.7%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 108th of 308 on pass rate, and 4th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That is 4.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 8.6 points above the 46.2% West Midlands 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 54.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.83 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Burton on Trent pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.83 times, or £113. Add 0.83 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 £197. The test cycle at Burton on Trent is therefore about £310. Testing here therefore saves about £52 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Burton on Trent costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 17 weeks in July 2026, 5.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.83 expected retakes that is about 14.1 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,254 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.8% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,842 first attempts at Burton on Trent, 2,170 passed, a rate of 56.5%, which is 1.7 points above the all-attempts figure. 103 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.68% 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 Burton on Trent has risen by 6.5 points, from 48.2% to 54.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,099 to 7,273 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £74 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 55.8% and female candidates at 53.3%, a gap of 2.5 points across 4,185 and 3,088 tests. Automatic tests made up 23.1% of the workload and passed at 43.9%, 10.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 50.1% in January 2026 to 60.8% in May 2025, a 10.7-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 Burton on Trent 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.