Cheetham Hill (Manchester) test centre: 44.7% pass rate, £416 to get through it.

10,207 candidates took the car practical test at Cheetham Hill (Manchester) during 2025/26 and 4,565 of them passed, a pass rate of 44.7%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 266th of 308 on pass rate, and 25th of 31 inside North West.

That is 5.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 4.3 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 44.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.24 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Cheetham Hill (Manchester) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.24 times, or £139. Add 1.24 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 £277. The test cycle at Cheetham Hill (Manchester) is therefore about £416. Testing here therefore costs about £68 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 Cheetham Hill (Manchester) ran to a median 10.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.24 expected retakes that is roughly 12.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 4,119 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,208 passes from 5,002 first tests at Cheetham Hill (Manchester), 44.1% against 44.7% for all attempts. 21 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 0.42% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Cheetham Hill (Manchester) has fallen by 1.6 points, from 46.3% to 44.7%. Volume has been steady, 9,360 tests then against 10,207 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £22 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 48.7% and female candidates at 40.5%, a gap of 8.1 points across 5,235 and 4,972 tests. Automatic tests made up 46.3% of the workload and passed at 41.5%, 3.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 40.8% in November 2025 to 47.4% in July 2025, a 6.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North West, Bredbury (Manchester) runs 11.3 points higher at 56.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £129 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.