Chesterfield test centre: 56.2% pass rate, £296 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Chesterfield conducted 6,605 car practical tests and issued 3,712 passes. The resulting 56.2% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 89th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 6th of 20 in East Midlands.

That is 6.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 5.4 points above the 50.8% East Midlands average. A centre in this band is usually working quieter road layouts with fewer forced lane decisions, not a softer marking standard: the DVSA marking sheet is national.

Turn 56.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.78 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Chesterfield pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.78 times, or £110. Add 0.78 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 £185. The test cycle at Chesterfield is therefore about £296. Testing here therefore saves about £66 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Chesterfield was 4.9 weeks in July 2026, 7.0 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.78 expected retakes add only around 3.8 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 2,372 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.7% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,945 passes from 3,440 first tests at Chesterfield, 56.5% against 56.2% for all attempts. 224 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.51% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Chesterfield has risen by 8.3 points, from 47.9% to 56.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,659 to 6,605 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £93 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Chesterfield, 56.3% against 56.1%. Automatic tests made up 24.6% of the workload and passed at 48.0%, 8.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 48.5% in June 2025 to 62.2% in May 2025, a 13.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East Midlands runs more than five points ahead of Chesterfield 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.