Rugby test centre: 51.4% pass rate, £346 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Rugby conducted 6,664 car practical tests and issued 3,425 passes. The resulting 51.4% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 169th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 10th of 26 in West Midlands.

That lands within 1.4 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 5.2 points above the 46.2% West Midlands average, which makes Rugby an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.95 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Rugby pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.95 times, or £121. Add 0.95 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 £225. The test cycle at Rugby is therefore about £346. Testing here therefore saves about £16 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Rugby ran to a median 9.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 2.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.95 expected retakes that is roughly 8.9 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,797 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.6% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,088 first attempts at Rugby, 1,699 passed, a rate of 55.0%, which is 3.6 points above the all-attempts figure. 199 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.44% 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 Rugby has fallen by 10.4 points, from 61.8% to 51.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,740 to 6,664 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £98 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 49.5% and female candidates at 53.7%, a gap of 4.3 points across 3,639 and 3,025 tests. Automatic tests made up 30.3% of the workload and passed at 43.7%, 7.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.5% in July 2025 to 61.0% in May 2025, a 15.6-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 Rugby 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.