Chadderton test centre: 46.8% pass rate, £388 to get through it.

15,988 candidates took the car practical test at Chadderton during 2025/26 and 7,475 of them passed, a pass rate of 46.8%. That is one of the busiest centres in Great Britain, ranked 242nd of 308 on pass rate, and 22nd of 31 inside North West.

That is 3.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 2.3 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 46.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.14 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Chadderton pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.14 times, or £133. Add 1.14 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 £255. The test cycle at Chadderton is therefore about £388. Testing here therefore costs about £40 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 Chadderton ran to a median 12 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.14 expected retakes that is roughly 13.7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 5,878 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.1% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 7,300 candidates sat their first test at Chadderton and 3,332 passed, 45.6%, which is 1.1 points below the all-attempts rate. 42 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 0.58% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Chadderton has fallen by 0.5 points, from 47.3% to 46.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 8,401 to 15,988 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £7 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 49.8% and female candidates at 43.3%, a gap of 6.4 points across 8,521 and 7,467 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.9% of the workload and passed at 40.7%, 6.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.3% in November 2025 to 50.4% in January 2026, a 7.1-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 Chadderton 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.