Norwich (Peachman Way) test centre: 61.7% pass rate, £257 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Norwich (Peachman Way) conducted 12,541 car practical tests and issued 7,740 passes. The resulting 61.7% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 37th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 2nd of 24 in East of England.

That is 11.7 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 10.3 points above the 51.4% East of England average. A centre in this band is usually working quieter road layouts with fewer forced lane decisions, not a softer marking standard: the DVSA marking sheet is national.

Turn 61.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.62 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Norwich (Peachman Way) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.62 times, or £100. Add 0.62 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the East of England rate of £36 an hour (the closest published band on our regional lesson table), and the extra lessons come to £156. The test cycle at Norwich (Peachman Way) is therefore about £257. Testing here therefore saves about £119 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Norwich (Peachman Way) ran to a median 10.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 1.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.62 expected retakes that is roughly 6.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 4,610 standard slots inside the booking window here and 7.0% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 7,263 first attempts at Norwich (Peachman Way), 4,584 passed, a rate of 63.1%, which is 1.4 points above the all-attempts figure. 708 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 9.75% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Norwich (Peachman Way) has risen by 4.8 points, from 56.9% to 61.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,984 to 12,541 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £43 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 62.5% and female candidates at 60.8%, a gap of 1.7 points across 6,677 and 5,864 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.7% of the workload and passed at 55.4%, 6.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 57.5% in March 2026 to 64.5% in August 2025, a 7.1-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in East of England runs more than five points ahead of Norwich (Peachman Way) 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.