Buxton test centre: 58.7% pass rate, £273 to get through it.

Buxton is a mid-sized centre, putting 4,904 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 2,878 passed, so the centre finished the year on 58.7% and 59th of 308 nationally, 3rd of 20 within East Midlands.

That is 8.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 7.9 points above the 50.8% East 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 58.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.70 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Buxton pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.70 times, or £106. Add 0.70 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £168. The test cycle at Buxton is therefore about £273. Testing here therefore saves about £89 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Buxton costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15 weeks in July 2026, 3.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.70 expected retakes that is about 10.6 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,476 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.3% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 2,278 first attempts at Buxton, 1,398 passed, a rate of 61.4%, which is 2.7 points above the all-attempts figure. 68 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.99% 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 Buxton has risen by 12.3 points, from 46.4% to 58.7%. Volume has been steady, 4,352 tests then against 4,904 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £136 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Buxton, 58.4% against 59.1%. Automatic tests made up 19.6% of the workload and passed at 47.5%, 11.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.6% in May 2025 to 62.6% in December 2025, a 13.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Buxton 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.