Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) test centre: 40.6% pass rate, £501 to get through it.

8,413 candidates took the car practical test at Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) during 2025/26 and 3,413 of them passed, a pass rate of 40.6%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 294th of 308 on pass rate, and 22nd of 26 inside West Midlands.

That is 9.5 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 5.6 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 40.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.46 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.46 times, or £153. Add 1.46 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 £349. The test cycle at Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) is therefore about £501. Testing here therefore costs about £139 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 Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) ran to a median 10.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.46 expected retakes that is roughly 15.2 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,712 standard slots inside the booking window here and 11.8% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 3,367 candidates sat their first test at Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) and 1,302 passed, 38.7%, which is 1.9 points below the all-attempts rate. 25 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 0.74% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Stoke-On-Trent (Cobridge) has risen by 4.6 points, from 35.9% to 40.6%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,409 to 8,413 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £95 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 41.4% and female candidates at 39.6%, a gap of 1.8 points across 4,570 and 3,843 tests. Automatic tests made up 31.6% of the workload and passed at 35.2%, 5.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 32.5% in May 2025 to 45.7% in September 2025, a 13.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in West Midlands, Birmingham (Kings Heath) runs 6.2 points higher at 46.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £98 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.