Northwich test centre: 57.6% pass rate, £273 to get through it.

3,529 candidates took the car practical test at Northwich during 2025/26 and 2,032 of them passed, a pass rate of 57.6%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 66th of 308 on pass rate, and 6th of 31 inside North West.

That is 7.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 8.6 points above the 49.0% North West 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 57.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.74 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Northwich pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.74 times, or £108. Add 0.74 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the North West rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £165. The test cycle at Northwich is therefore about £273. Testing here therefore saves about £75 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Northwich. DVSA recorded a median wait of 19.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 7.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.74 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 14.1 extra weeks of waiting, close to 3 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 859 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.7% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,125 passes from 1,962 first tests at Northwich, 57.3% against 57.6% for all attempts. 27 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.38% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Northwich has fallen by 2.6 points, from 60.1% to 57.6%. Volume has been steady, 3,202 tests then against 3,529 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £21 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Northwich, 57.9% against 57.2%. Automatic tests made up 12.7% of the workload and passed at 48.7%, 8.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 52.9% in September 2025 to 62.5% in June 2025, a 9.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in North West, Kendal (Oxenholme Road) runs 7.5 points higher at 65.1%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £58 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.