UK cost surveys — driving
We read 25 UK driving websites, one business per city, and recorded what each publishes for a one hour, manual.
Block bookings are cheaper per hour and are excluded, as are schools that publish only a multi-hour package. Two national schools publish an hourly rate that exists only inside the JavaScript their booking widget consumes, so no price appears in the page an assistant is served.
| City | Business and the wording they used | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Swansea | Next Generation School of Motoring1 Hour Lesson: £29.00 | £29 |
| Birmingham | Bill Plant Driving School1-hour lessons start from just £35 | £35+ |
| Chester | Nigel Richards Driving School£35 hourly rate, before block-booking discounts | £35 |
| Coventry | Cov Driving SchoolManual Lesson Price £35.00 — the one price in the survey published in machine-readable form | £35 |
| Dundee | Drivologypay as you go 1 Hour £35 | £35 |
| Plymouth | Streets Ahead Driving School£35 for 1 Hour Lesson | £35 |
| Preston | Preston Driving SchoolStandard / Student hourly rate £35 | £35 |
| Stoke-on-Trent | Samia's Driving School£35 per hour for manual lessons | £35 |
| Ipswich | Nayland Driving School1 Hour £40 (2 hours £80) | £40 |
| Swindon | Driveby School of Motoring1 hour lesson £40 (2 hour lesson £80) | £40 |
| Belfast | NI Driving School1 Manual Driving Lesson £45 (1 Hour Automatic £50) | £45 |
| Brighton | Brighton Driving LessonsStandard 2 hour lesson £90 (£45 per hour); refresher lessons £45 per hour | £45 |
| Liverpool | Neon Driving SchoolShort - 1 Hour, manual £45 (automatic £50) | £45 |
| Oxford | Oxford LDA1 hr £45 (1.5 hrs £70, 2 hrs £90) | £45 |
A “+” marks a price the business published as a “from” figure. Prices are quoted with the business's own label because the label is doing real work: a 30-minute session and a 60-minute session are not the same product, and an out-of-hours rate is not a consultation fee.
11 of the 25 businesses we read could not be included, and why is as interesting as the prices:
One business per city, found the way an assistant finds one: a plain search for the service and the city, first usable result. Every price is quoted from the business's own published page on the measurement date, with the label they used; where a business published a range or a 'from' price, that is stated. Candidates are gathered by tooling/price-survey.mjs and then curated by hand, because the automated pass reads out-of-hours rates, care-plan monthly fees and multi-hour blocks as if they were standard prices. A business is excluded rather than guessed at, and every exclusion is published with its reason.
Of 46 UK service websites read across four verticals, 0 could accept a booking or quote request from a machine, and 2 published a price in structured data. Two, and one of them changed under us. A driving school publishes prices through a Wix Stores payload it did not author. Harley Private Dental was recorded on 31 July as marking up its catalogue with Offer/OfferCatalog and no price values; re-measured on 6 August it carries three populated Offer prices (£110, £105, £85). We cannot tell whether the site changed or the first reading was wrong, and we are not going to guess — the current state is what is stated here. The other 15 dental practices re-checked the same day publish no price in structured data, and 13 of the 17 publish JSON-LD at all. A further 4 publish a price that exists only inside a JavaScript payload, so an assistant fetching the page is served no price at all.
These prices are published for people and invisible to machines. That is the gap this survey exists to measure, and the full survey has the method and every row.
Your prices are already public. Ajar publishes them in a form an assistant can read and act on, and holds every request for you to approve before anything binds. Nothing changes on your website.