Stafford test centre: 45.8% pass rate, £417 to get through it.

5,365 candidates took the car practical test at Stafford during 2025/26 and 2,459 of them passed, a pass rate of 45.8%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 256th of 308 on pass rate, and 17th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That is 4.2 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 0.4 points below the 46.2% average for West 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 45.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.18 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Stafford pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.18 times, or £135. Add 1.18 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 £281. The test cycle at Stafford is therefore about £417. Testing here therefore costs about £55 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.

A fail at Stafford costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 17.7 weeks in July 2026, 5.8 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.18 expected retakes that is about 20.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,061 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,163 passes from 2,538 first tests at Stafford, 45.8% against 45.8% for all attempts. 34 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.34% of them.

The pass rate at Stafford has held flat since 2021/22, moving from 46.2% to 45.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,670 to 5,365 tests a year. A stable rate is the useful kind for planning, because it means this year's figure is a fair guide to next year's odds.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Stafford, 45.6% against 46.1%. Automatic tests made up 22.2% of the workload and passed at 33.8%, 12.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 41.7% in May 2025 to 50.1% in August 2025, a 8.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in West Midlands, Shrewsbury runs 5.2 points higher at 51.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £66 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.