Worcester test centre: 51.9% pass rate, £340 to get through it.

11,590 candidates took the car practical test at Worcester during 2025/26 and 6,019 of them passed, a pass rate of 51.9%. That is a high-volume centre, ranked 154th of 308 on pass rate, and 9th of 26 inside West Midlands.

That lands within 1.9 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 5.7 points above the 46.2% West Midlands average, which makes Worcester an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.93 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Worcester pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.93 times, or £119. Add 0.93 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 £220. The test cycle at Worcester is therefore about £340. Testing here therefore saves about £22 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Worcester ran to a median 11.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 0.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.93 expected retakes that is roughly 10.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 3,925 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 3,040 passes from 5,818 first tests at Worcester, 52.3% against 51.9% for all attempts. 77 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.32% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Worcester has fallen by 2.7 points, from 54.6% to 51.9%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,931 to 11,590 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £28 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 54.0% and female candidates at 49.6%, a gap of 4.4 points across 6,081 and 5,509 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.1% of the workload and passed at 44.4%, 7.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.1% in October 2025 to 56.9% in February 2026, a 7.8-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 Worcester 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.