Peterborough test centre: 52.8% pass rate, £343 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Peterborough conducted 10,551 car practical tests and issued 5,569 passes. The resulting 52.8% makes it a high-volume centre sitting 140th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 8th of 24 in East of England.

That lands within 2.8 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.4 points above the 51.4% East of England average, which makes Peterborough an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 52.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.89 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Peterborough pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.89 times, or £117. Add 0.89 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 £225. The test cycle at Peterborough is therefore about £343. Testing here therefore saves about £33 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Peterborough costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 17 weeks in July 2026, 5.1 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.89 expected retakes that is about 15.2 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,773 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 2,878 passes from 5,406 first tests at Peterborough, 53.2% against 52.8% for all attempts. 189 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.50% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Peterborough has risen by 1.1 points, from 51.6% to 52.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 9,089 to 10,551 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £13 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 54.5% and female candidates at 50.8%, a gap of 3.7 points across 5,590 and 4,961 tests. Automatic tests made up 30.8% of the workload and passed at 47.6%, 5.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 50.3% in July 2025 to 55.5% in February 2026, a 5.2-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East of England, Ipswich runs 9.5 points higher at 62.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £91 of expected difference. Before moving, price the switch: a new instructor or extra travel for route familiarity typically costs £60 to £120 plus two settling-in lessons, which eats most of a gap under about eight points.