Nottingham (Colwick) test centre: 46.4% pass rate, £408 to get through it.

Nottingham (Colwick) is one of the busiest centres in Great Britain, putting 15,150 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 7,032 passed, so the centre finished the year on 46.4% and 246th of 308 nationally, 17th of 20 within East Midlands.

That is 3.6 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 4.3 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 46.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.15 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Nottingham (Colwick) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.15 times, or £134. Add 1.15 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 £275. The test cycle at Nottingham (Colwick) is therefore about £408. Testing here therefore costs about £46 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 Nottingham (Colwick) ran to a median 8.3 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 3.6 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.15 expected retakes that is roughly 9.6 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 5,467 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.3% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 7,214 first attempts at Nottingham (Colwick), 3,432 passed, a rate of 47.6%, which is 1.1 points above the all-attempts figure. 141 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.95% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Nottingham (Colwick) has fallen by 2.1 points, from 48.5% to 46.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,957 to 15,150 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £28 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 45.8% and female candidates at 47.3%, a gap of 1.5 points across 8,702 and 6,448 tests. Automatic tests made up 35.5% of the workload and passed at 42.4%, 4.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 40.5% in October 2025 to 50.5% in April 2025, a 9.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East Midlands, Northampton runs 5.6 points higher at 52.1%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £70 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.