Lichfield test centre: 53.0% pass rate, £328 to get through it.

Lichfield is a mid-sized centre, putting 5,944 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 3,153 passed, so the centre finished the year on 53.0% and 133rd of 308 nationally, 7th of 26 within West Midlands.

That is 3.0 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.9 points above the 46.2% West 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 53.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.89 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Lichfield pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.89 times, or £117. Add 0.89 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the West Midlands rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £211. The test cycle at Lichfield is therefore about £328. Testing here therefore saves about £34 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Lichfield. DVSA recorded a median wait of 20.4 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 8.5 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.89 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 18.1 extra weeks of waiting, close to 4 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 1,952 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,696 passes from 3,184 first tests at Lichfield, 53.3% against 53.0% for all attempts. 49 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.54% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Lichfield has risen by 8.9 points, from 44.2% to 53.0%. Volume has been steady, 6,981 tests then against 5,944 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £113 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 54.4% and female candidates at 51.6%, a gap of 2.8 points across 3,045 and 2,899 tests. Automatic tests made up 17.1% of the workload and passed at 46.0%, 7.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 50.9% in December 2025 to 58.4% in November 2025, a 7.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in West Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Lichfield 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.