Macclesfield test centre: 51.9% pass rate, £327 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Macclesfield conducted 4,509 car practical tests and issued 2,341 passes. The resulting 51.9% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 155th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 14th of 31 in North West.

That lands within 1.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.9 points above the 49.0% North West average, which makes Macclesfield an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.93 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Macclesfield pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.93 times, or £119. Add 0.93 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 £207. The test cycle at Macclesfield is therefore about £327. Testing here therefore saves about £21 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 Macclesfield. DVSA recorded a median wait of 21.4 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 9.5 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.93 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 19.8 extra weeks of waiting, close to 5 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 1,703 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.8% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,221 passes from 2,337 first tests at Macclesfield, 52.3% against 51.9% for all attempts. 30 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.28% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Macclesfield has risen by 1.5 points, from 50.4% to 51.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,573 to 4,509 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £16 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 53.7% and female candidates at 49.8%, a gap of 3.9 points across 2,493 and 2,016 tests. Automatic tests made up 22.2% of the workload and passed at 44.7%, 7.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.8% in May 2025 to 56.0% in October 2025, a 7.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North West, Heysham runs 7.3 points higher at 59.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £68 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.