Sheffield (Middlewood Road) test centre: 48.7% pass rate, £363 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Sheffield (Middlewood Road) conducted 10,442 car practical tests and issued 5,085 passes. The resulting 48.7% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 213th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 19th of 29 in Yorkshire and The Humber.

That lands within 1.3 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.8 points below the 50.5% Yorkshire and The Humber average, which makes Sheffield (Middlewood Road) an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.05 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Sheffield (Middlewood Road) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.05 times, or £127. Add 1.05 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Yorkshire & Humber rate of £32 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £236. The test cycle at Sheffield (Middlewood Road) is therefore about £363. Testing here therefore costs about £15 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.

The queue is the expensive part at Sheffield (Middlewood Road). DVSA recorded a median wait of 18.6 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 6.7 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.05 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 19.6 extra weeks of waiting, close to 5 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 3,134 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.9% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 5,167 first attempts at Sheffield (Middlewood Road), 2,601 passed, a rate of 50.3%, which is 1.6 points above the all-attempts figure. 166 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.21% 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 Sheffield (Middlewood Road) has risen by 2.8 points, from 45.9% to 48.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 6,467 to 10,442 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £35 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 50.6% and female candidates at 46.6%, a gap of 4.1 points across 5,489 and 4,953 tests. Automatic tests made up 36.4% of the workload and passed at 43.2%, 5.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.1% in November 2025 to 52.6% in August 2025, a 7.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Yorkshire and The Humber, York runs 5.7 points higher at 54.4%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £62 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.