Nottingham (Chilwell) test centre: 49.9% pass rate, £363 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Nottingham (Chilwell) conducted 9,415 car practical tests and issued 4,697 passes. The resulting 49.9% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 198th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 15th of 20 in East Midlands.

That lands within 0.1 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.9 points below the 50.8% East Midlands average, which makes Nottingham (Chilwell) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 49.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.00 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Nottingham (Chilwell) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.00 times, or £124. Add 1.00 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 £239. The test cycle at Nottingham (Chilwell) is therefore about £363. That is within £1 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Nottingham (Chilwell) is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Waiting time at Nottingham (Chilwell) ran to a median 7.7 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.2 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.00 expected retakes that is roughly 7.7 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,715 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.1% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,406 passes from 4,888 first tests at Nottingham (Chilwell), 49.2% against 49.9% for all attempts. 126 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.58% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Nottingham (Chilwell) has risen by 1.0 points, from 48.9% to 49.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,008 to 9,415 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £12 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 50.5% and female candidates at 49.1%, a gap of 1.4 points across 5,210 and 4,205 tests. Automatic tests made up 26.6% of the workload and passed at 43.4%, 6.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.6% in September 2025 to 56.4% in January 2026, a 12.8-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Ashfield runs 7.4 points higher at 57.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £78 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.