Bury (Manchester) test centre: 46.3% pass rate, £393 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Bury (Manchester) conducted 7,024 car practical tests and issued 3,255 passes. The resulting 46.3% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 248th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 24th of 31 in North West.

That is 3.7 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 2.7 points below the 49.0% average for North West. 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 46.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.16 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Bury (Manchester) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.16 times, or £134. Add 1.16 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 £259. The test cycle at Bury (Manchester) is therefore about £393. Testing here therefore costs about £45 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 Bury (Manchester) ran to a median 7.6 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.3 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.16 expected retakes that is roughly 8.8 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,202 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,510 passes from 3,304 first tests at Bury (Manchester), 45.7% against 46.3% for all attempts. 6 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 0.18% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Bury (Manchester) has risen by 7.8 points, from 38.5% to 46.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,454 to 7,024 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £125 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.9% and female candidates at 43.0%, a gap of 5.9 points across 3,941 and 3,083 tests. Automatic tests made up 25.9% of the workload and passed at 38.9%, 7.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 41.9% in May 2025 to 50.5% in August 2025, a 8.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North West, Warrington runs 9.2 points higher at 55.5%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £102 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.