Ludlow test centre: 58.7% pass rate, £273 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Ludlow conducted 5,051 car practical tests and issued 2,966 passes. The resulting 58.7% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 56th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 2nd of 26 in West Midlands.

That is 8.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 12.5 points above the 46.2% West 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 58.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.70 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Ludlow pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.70 times, or £106. Add 0.70 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 £167. The test cycle at Ludlow is therefore about £273. Testing here therefore saves about £89 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Ludlow ran to a median 10.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.70 expected retakes that is roughly 7.1 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,679 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.4% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 2,281 first attempts at Ludlow, 1,405 passed, a rate of 61.6%, which is 2.9 points above the all-attempts figure. 91 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.99% 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 Ludlow has risen by 5.8 points, from 52.9% to 58.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,973 to 5,051 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £56 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 61.0% and female candidates at 55.9%, a gap of 5.2 points across 2,816 and 2,234 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.4% of the workload and passed at 45.1%, 13.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 55.5% in November 2025 to 61.6% in January 2026, a 6.1-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 Ludlow 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.