Leicester (Cannock Street) test centre: 40.2% pass rate, £508 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Leicester (Cannock Street) conducted 14,198 car practical tests and issued 5,708 passes. The resulting 40.2% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 297th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 20th of 20 in East Midlands.

That is 9.8 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 10.6 points below the 50.8% average for East Midlands. 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 40.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.49 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Leicester (Cannock Street) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.49 times, or £154. Add 1.49 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 £354. The test cycle at Leicester (Cannock Street) is therefore about £508. Testing here therefore costs about £146 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.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Leicester (Cannock Street) was 6.4 weeks in July 2026, 5.5 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 1.49 expected retakes add only around 9.5 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 3,257 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.1% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 5,632 candidates sat their first test at Leicester (Cannock Street) and 2,166 passed, 38.5%, which is 1.7 points below the all-attempts rate. 96 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.70% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Leicester (Cannock Street) has risen by 1.0 points, from 39.2% to 40.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 8,251 to 14,198 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £19 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 42.3% and female candidates at 37.3%, a gap of 5.0 points across 8,277 and 5,921 tests. Automatic tests made up 28.5% of the workload and passed at 35.4%, 4.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 37.3% in January 2026 to 43.6% in March 2026, a 6.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Northampton runs 11.9 points higher at 52.1%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £170 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.