About $77 an hour. Across the 38 verified instructors listing a rate on DriveBuddy right now, most charge between $70 and $80. These are the rates being asked today, not a survey — they change as instructors change them. Every figure here is the instructor's hourly rate. Buying lesson credit adds our 2% platform processing fee, and a single lesson paid up front is a credit purchase too; spending credit you already hold carries no fee. Today the only cities with enough of them to quote a median are Melbourne and Brisbane.
A city here is its whole metropolitan area, not the CBD — the instructors its hub page lists, counting those who publish a rate. The median is the middle instructor, not an average, so one expensive listing cannot drag it upward.
A city with only a handful of instructors priced is a small sample rather than a cheap market — read those rows as what those instructors charge. A city with fewer than 5 priced instructors keeps its row but gets no rate, because below that the figure describes whoever happens to be listed. Prices by state are on the directory hub. Nobody is listed in Perth, Hobart, Darwin or Canberra yet, so they are not in the table.
A price per hour only matters once you know how many hours.
The number of lessons — and the total cost — depends on how much experience you already have. Answer a few quick questions for a rough guide.
22 hours to go
about 22 one-hour lessons · roughly $1,694 to get test-ready, at Australia's $77/hr median
This is a guide based on typical learners — the lessons you actually need will vary with practice and confidence. It isn't a fixed quote.
These are the fees from no licence to a first provisional one — not through to a full licence, which adds more. Lessons are the part of learning to drive you can shop around for. The permit, the tests and the licence are fixed, they are not small, and they are not the same steps everywhere — the ACT requires a pre-learner course no other jurisdiction does, and the Northern Territory has no hazard perception test at all. Victoria is the cheapest on purpose: its Motorist Package waives the permit, the licence and both online tests, leaving only the drive test. When you pay differs too. In New South Wales $90 of the $294 buys the permit and the rest comes later, at the hazard perception test and on test day. In Western Australia it is the other way around: $173.20 of the $203.10 we can verify is the permit and theory test, up front.
| State | Government fees | Steps on the path |
|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | $294 | Driver knowledge test, Learner licence, Hazard perception test, Driving test and Provisional P1 licence |
| Victoria | $75.30 | Learner permit test, Learner permit, Hazard perception test, Drive test and Probationary P1 licence |
| Queensland | $316.60 | PrepL or written road rules test, Learner licence, Hazard perception test, Practical driving test and Provisional P1 licence |
| Western Australia | from $203.10 | Computerised theory test, Learner's permit, Hazard perception test, Practical driving assessment and Provisional licence |
| South Australia | $352 | Theory test or myLs course, Learner's permit, Hazard perception test, Practical test or competency-based assessment (set by your instructor) and Provisional licence |
| Tasmania | $217.73 | Knowledge test, Learner licence, Hazard perception test, P1 driving assessment and Provisional licence |
| Australian Capital Territory | $365.30 | Pre-learner course and knowledge test (set by the course provider), Learner licence, Hazard perception test, Driving assessment booking and Provisional licence |
| Northern Territory | $110 | Theory test, Learner licence, Practical driving test (set by a private authorised examiner) and Provisional licence |
A total shown as "from" is one we could not finish: Western Australia publishes licence fees but never says which term a first P licence takes, so its total is a floor rather than the figure. That is different from a step no government charges for at all — the practical test in South Australia and the Northern Territory is set by your instructor or a private examiner, and the ACT's pre-learner course by whoever runs it. Those totals are complete as government fees; the step is named in the last column so you can see what else you will pay for. We would rather show the gap than fill it with a guess. Fees checked against each authority's own schedule on 15 September 2026; most reset on 1 July.
Fees are from Transport for NSW, VicRoads, the Queensland Government, the WA Department of Transport and Major Infrastructure, the South Australian Government, Transport Tasmania, Access Canberra and the Northern Territory Government. Victoria's waived fees assume you sit both tests online and pass first time. In person the learner permit test is $50.80 and the hazard perception test $44.00.
Lessons at the national median of $77 an hour, plus your state's fees.
$1,988 or more
$1,694 of lessons · $294 or more in government fees
The estimator above suggests how many hours you are likely to need. Government fees assume you pass each test first time — most states charge again for a resit, and in New South Wales that is $58 for the hazard perception test and $72 for the driving test.
Find instructors near youMore than where you live. When we surveyed Melbourne driving schools, every region of the city returned a median of exactly $70 an hour — while inside one region the same lesson varied by up to $32 an hour. The instructor you choose moves the price far more than the postcode does. The table above gives each city's middle, and the directory goes down to the suburb, where every instructor's own rate is listed.
38 instructors here teach in an automatic and 2 teach in a manual, counting anyone who teaches both in each, of the 38 who tell us which they teach. Because the manual group is under 5, one instructor would move the median, so we publish the counts rather than a comparison you could not rely on. When manual is this scarce, the real cost of choosing it is finding an instructor at all, not the hourly rate. If you only ever intend to drive an automatic, an automatic licence is the shorter and cheaper path. Learning in a manual now saves a second set of lessons later, but only if you can book one near you — check how many manual instructors your suburb has before you commit to it.
Buying 6 hours or more of credit at once can take 5% off, and 10 hours or more up to 10%, funded by the instructor selling it rather than added to their rate. Both bands are larger than the 2% processing fee on the purchase, so a pack still works out below the rate on the profile. Take one lesson first: a pack with the wrong instructor is the most expensive thing on this page.
In our August 2026 Melbourne survey the same one-hour test-day package ran $160 at one school and $267 at another — the widest gap we measured on a like-for-like package. What it includes varies — a lesson beforehand and use of the car is common, nothing is standard — so ask what is in it before you book.
Three states pay you back in logbook hours for buying lessons. In New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT a qualifying instructor hour is credited as three, to a ceiling of 10 instructor hours — so the most the scheme is ever worth is 20 hours you do not have to drive. At a $77 median that is about $770 of lessons buying back 20 hours you would otherwise have to drive, which is the arithmetic that matters here rather than a few dollars off an hourly rate. Night driving is the catch: in New South Wales the bonus cannot be logged as night hours, and in Queensland a night lesson counts either as three daytime hours or as one night hour, not both. Each state is also specific about who counts — a structured lesson with an instructor licensed in New South Wales, an accredited driver trainer in Queensland, an ACT Accredited Driving Instructor in the ACT. An hour with anyone else is credited one for one. Victoria credits an instructor hour as one hour, so none of this applies there. Our Victorian 120-hour guide puts Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT side by side, with the hours, night hours and cap for each.
Logbook rules are from Transport for NSW, the Queensland Government, Access Canberra and the Victorian Road to Solo Driving handbook (PDF, April 2023 edition), which sets out Victoria's 120 hours with no instructor multiplier. Always check your own state's current rules before you plan around them.
Every live rate on this page is read from what instructors are listing on DriveBuddy right now. The four survey figures, marked as such where they appear, come from the price study below. We re-read them at least every six hours, so the figures follow the market rather than a publication date. The headline rates were read on 26 September 2026; the city table and the transmission counts are refreshed on their own six-hour cycles. We publish the median, the middle instructor, rather than the average, because one unusually high rate would drag an average upward and nobody would be charging it. No median on this page is published from fewer than 5 instructors — national, city or transmission — because a national page should not build a city figure out of two or three people. The state, city and suburb pages do publish smaller samples, with the count beside them, because there the question is what these particular instructors charge. A city means its whole metropolitan area, and its count is the instructors there who publish a rate. Supply is not spread evenly: most of the instructors behind the national figure are in Melbourne, so read it as what the market charges where we have depth rather than as an even national average.
That makes these figures different from our survey of 86 Melbourne driving schools, which put the median advertised hour at $70 in August 2026 across the 57 of them that published a rate. That survey read prices off driving-school websites across the whole city; this page reads what instructors on DriveBuddy are charging now. Different populations, so expect different numbers — the survey is the better picture of the wider market, and this page is the better picture of what instructors here are charging. The survey article also quotes a DriveBuddy median from August 2026; the figure on this page is the current one.
About $77 an hour. Across the 38 verified instructors listing a rate on DriveBuddy, most charge between $70 and $80 an hour. The cheapest rate listed is $65 and the dearest is $100. Those are the instructors' hourly rates. Buying lesson credit adds a 2% platform processing fee, and a single lesson paid up front counts as a credit purchase; spending credit you already hold carries no fee. Rates vary by city and by instructor rather than by a national price list.
It depends almost entirely on how much supervised practice you get between lessons. Someone driving regularly with a parent may need only a handful of paid hours; someone relying on lessons alone needs considerably more. The estimator on this page assumes 22 hours before you tell it anything, then moves between 3 and 25 as you answer — so the figure falls as you log practice. Treat it as something to budget against, not a quote.
An hour is the standard, and it is what every rate on DriveBuddy is quoted at. Instructors here also offer two-hour lessons, which some learners prefer once they are driving further from home, and the longer lesson is charged at the same hourly rate rather than a discount.
On DriveBuddy they can be. Buying 6 to 9 hours of lesson credit at once takes 5% off, and 10 hours or more takes 10% off, for learners who found their instructor here — the instructor selling the pack funds that discount rather than raising their rate, and it does not apply to every instructor. Buying credit also carries a 2% platform processing fee, charged on the discounted amount; spending credit you already hold carries no fee. Where the discount applies it is larger than the fee, so a pack works out below the hourly rate on the profile, and checkout shows the total before you confirm. The real risk is buying before you have had a lesson with someone: one lesson first tells you whether you want ten.
New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT do. All three record three logbook hours for each hour with a qualifying instructor, capped at 10 instructor hours — so ten hours of lessons are worth thirty. Who qualifies differs: NSW requires a structured lesson with an instructor licensed there, Queensland a lesson with an accredited driver trainer (a night lesson counts as three daytime hours or one night hour, not both), and the ACT an ACT Accredited Driving Instructor. Victoria credits an instructor hour as a single hour, so the scheme is worth nothing there. Check your own state's rule before you plan around it.
The live rates here come from verified instructors listing on DriveBuddy. Pick your suburb to see who teaches there, what each of them charges, and when they are free.
Browse instructors by suburb