Telford test centre: 48.9% pass rate, £375 to get through it.

4,963 candidates took the car practical test at Telford during 2025/26 and 2,429 of them passed, a pass rate of 48.9%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 209th of 308 on pass rate, and 13th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That lands within 1.1 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 2.8 points above the 46.2% West Midlands average, which makes Telford an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.04 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Telford pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.04 times, or £127. Add 1.04 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 £248. The test cycle at Telford is therefore about £375. That is within £13 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Telford is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

The queue is the expensive part at Telford. DVSA recorded a median wait of 22.6 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 10.7 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.04 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 23.6 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 1,845 standard slots inside the booking window here and 2.9% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,230 passes from 2,558 first tests at Telford, 48.1% against 48.9% for all attempts. 34 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.33% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Telford has risen by 4.6 points, from 44.4% to 48.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,143 to 4,963 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £63 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 52.0% and female candidates at 45.9%, a gap of 6.0 points across 2,473 and 2,490 tests. Automatic tests made up 24.1% of the workload and passed at 43.9%, 5.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 40.2% in March 2026 to 53.1% in April 2025, a 12.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in West Midlands, Ludlow runs 9.8 points higher at 58.7%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £102 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.