The campus is right here at home — 950 Trinity Drive, Mansfield, TX. The highest rated CDL school in all of DFW, in your own backyard. 926 five-star reviews, on-site testing, and a 97% first-time pass rate.
Call Now · Real People Answer 817-864-8086Most people in Mansfield have driven past this campus without ever registering what it was. Advance Career Education sits at 950 Trinity Drive, in the older industrial grid on the south side of town — off South Main Street, around the corner from Airport Drive, with a working forge shop across the street and Klein Tools Boulevard just up the road. Coming to class here isn't a commute. It's an errand.
That's not a figure of speech. From Main and Broad in Historic Downtown Mansfield the yard is 1.4 miles away, about four minutes. From the Debbie Lane and North Walnut Creek Drive side of the north side, roughly 3.5 miles. Practically every address in this city sits inside a fifteen-minute drive, and the turn-by-turn is further down this page.
What's at the end of that short drive is the highest rated CDL school in the entire DFW area — 926 five-star Google reviews at a 5.0 rating, a number no other school in or around Mansfield comes near. We're a CVTA member school (an association only top-tier schools are accepted into), a Licensed Third-Party Testing facility, TWC approved, and listed on the FMCSA Training Provider Registry. You train legally, to the real federal standard, in your own city.
What we teach is Class A — the license behind the tractor-trailers running US-287 and SH-360 past this town every hour of the day. That focus is deliberate. Class B and school bus training are coming soon and currently waitlist-only, so the entire fleet, yard and instructor roster point at one outcome: getting you through a Class A skills test and into a truck.
Here's something even lifelong residents get wrong: Mansfield has no Texas DPS driver license office. Not a small one, not a part-time one. The county counter most people are thinking of handles vehicle registration and titling — tags and titles. Driver licensing and road tests happen somewhere else entirely.
For a commercial license the gap is wider than most people realize. Most Texas DPS offices do not administer the CDL skills test at all, and the ones that do book out by appointment. For a Mansfield resident that means driving out of the city to a DFW-area office that does test, on a date the state has open rather than one you pick, in a commercial vehicle you have to bring yourself.
That's the problem ACE removes by being a Licensed Third-Party Testing facility for both the commercial learner permit and the license itself. Your skills test happens at 950 Trinity Drive, on the same concrete pads and in the same truck you trained in — no state appointment to hunt down, and no first look at an unfamiliar range on the one morning that actually counts. Classroom, range, road, permit, license: for a Mansfield student it all happens at one address inside your own zip code.
A CDL is only as good as the truck you learned on. At ACE, Mansfield students train on a real, modern fleet on concrete pads — the same surfaces and conditions you'll face on the job — so nothing about your first day at work is a surprise. No shortcuts, no bare-minimum approach.
Most schools teach the bare minimum to pass the test. We train you for the job. That's why ACE graduates from Mansfield show up to work day one already backing into tight spaces, docking cleanly, and handling whatever truck they're handed. See the full Class A programs →
Mansfield is not a bedroom community that happens to have a truck school in it. Read the street names around our campus and the point makes itself: Industrial Boulevard, Steel Haulers Drive, Sentry Drive, Airport Drive, Klein Tools Boulevard. There's a working forge shop directly across the street from us, and a rail line through town with industrial spurs coming off it. Our students don't visit the freight district. They train in it.
The road network is the reason any of it is here. US-287 runs as a freeway just east of the campus, while Business US-287 threads through town as Main Street — the same street you'd take to get to us. The southern end of SH-360 meets US-287 at the south end of town, and from there the freeway runs north toward SH-121 and DFW International Airport. I-20 is a short run north. Those three roads are a fair summary of a local driver's working life.
The employers follow the roads. Mouser Electronics runs its global headquarters and distribution center up North Main Street, a few miles north of us on the same road. Methodist Mansfield Medical Center anchors the east side of town, and Amazon operates a delivery station on the southwest side, out by the business park where the distribution buildings went in. Out along the SH-360 corridor is where the newer big-box development has been aimed.
For a new Class A holder the mix matters more than any single name on it. Manufacturing freight, distribution freight, medical and retail resupply and a rail line all move inside one small city, and the corridors feeding them put the rest of the Metroplex within an easy run — which is why students also come to this yard from Arlington, Fort Worth and Dallas. You just happen to already live at the intersection.
Texas hands out a Class A the same way to everyone, and the path is shorter than most callers expect. Four steps, in order, with no legal way around any of them.
The step people misunderstand is the second one. Entry-level driver training has to come from a provider listed on the FMCSA Training Provider Registry — federal law, not a school preference — and a provider who isn't on that registry cannot legally put you in front of a skills examiner. ACE is on it.
Most students finish in about 3 to 4 weeks. The Mansfield version is unusual only in its geography: all four steps land at one address in the city you already live in, because permit testing and the licensed third-party skills test both happen on the campus where the training happens. The long version is written out in how to get a CDL in Texas, step by step; if hazmat, tanker or doubles and triples are already on your mind, start with the Texas CDL endorsements guide.
Money is the first question on most calls, and the honest answer is that a lot of our students never write a tuition check at all. ACE is TWC approved, and Texas Workforce Commission workforce-grant funding can cover the program for students who qualify — which for plenty of Mansfield residents works out to $0 out of pocket.
Read the next part twice, because it's where this differs from how a lot of training gets sold: there is no carrier employment contract. You aren't trading a year of your working life to one trucking company in exchange for a license, and there's no tuition clawback if the first job turns out to be the wrong fit. You graduate with a Class A that belongs to you and take it wherever you want.
Eligibility depends on your situation, and sorting it out is a short phone call, not a form. Call 817-864-8086 and we'll tell you straight whether you qualify — or read the full breakdown of what CDL training costs in Texas first. The complete program list lives on the programs page.
A good number of our Mansfield students are already working when they enroll — on a plant floor off Industrial Boulevard, in a distribution building, at the hospital. Nobody has to quit to get licensed. ACE runs evening classes alongside day classes, with the same instructors, the same trucks, the same curriculum, and the same on-campus permit and skills testing.
For someone who lives here that costs almost nothing. A student driving in from another city loses part of the evening to the drive before class even starts; a Mansfield student clocks out, runs a few minutes down Main Street and is on the pad. We deliberately don't publish class times or start dates on this site — they move, and a stale calendar is worse than none. Call 817-864-8086 for current start dates, and a person will answer.
There is no highway leg to this. Whatever side of town you're on, aim for Broad Street, turn south onto South Main Street and take it through downtown, then go right on Airport Drive and left on Trinity Drive. We're at 950, on the block with the forge.
From downtown — the blocks around Main and Broad, the Farr Best Theater, the Historical Museum — it's 1.4 miles and about four minutes; you're just continuing south on the street you're already parked on. From the north side around Debbie Lane, Matlock Road and North Walnut Creek Drive, come down to Broad and pick up Main: roughly 3.5 miles, eight or nine minutes. From the east side near Methodist Mansfield, Heritage Parkway and Mansfield National, run west on Broad Street to Main: four to five miles, nine to twelve minutes. If you're already out on US-287 or coming down SH-360, exit at Broad and do the same three moves.
The address is 950 Trinity Drive, Mansfield, TX 76063. Plenty of parking, real people at the front desk, and if you call ahead we'll walk you out to the trucks and the yard.