Peterborough Theory Test Centre: 42.25% pass rate

Of the 22,356 car theory tests sat at Peterborough in the year to March 2026, 9,446 ended in a pass and 12,910 in a fail. 42.25% is 2.59 points below the 44.84% national figure. That is the 141st highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 12th of 13 in the East of England. Peterborough is a high-volume centre, working through roughly 1,863 sittings a month.

Fees are the same £23 nationwide, which makes the pass rate the whole of the cost story. Each pass at Peterborough takes 2.37 sittings on average, which is £54.43 of DVSA fees per licence, £3.14 more than the £51.29 national figure. Put another way, 57.7% of the £514k paid in theory fees at Peterborough last year bought a test that did not end in a pass, or £297k.

The recorded gender split separates the two groups at Peterborough: 44.42% for the 10,347 tests sat by women and 40.39% for the 12,009 sat by men, against a national gap of 4.20 points. That works out at roughly £5.17 of fee difference per licence.

Month to month the rate moves about. August 2025 was the strongest month here at 44.9%, November 2025 the weakest at 39.7%, and August 2025 the busiest with 2,204 sittings. A swing of 5.1 points across one year is normal in a sample this size and is not a reason to time a booking.

The direction of travel matters more than any single year. Peterborough slipped 0.53 points from 2024/25, and across the 19 years DVSA publishes for this centre the rate has moved from 62.59% in 2007/08 to 42.25% now. Applying today's £23 fee to both, the expected cost of a pass has gone from £36.75 to £54.43.

Peterborough sits 17 miles from Huntingdon, its closest neighbour, which recorded 46.03%. Rushden, 25 miles out, is the strongest of the five nearest at 52.00%, a difference worth £10.20 per pass on paper, and still not worth the journey. Travelling changes nothing you can bank: every centre runs the same question bank and the same 43-out-of-50 pass mark, and DVSA charges the same £23 wherever you sit it.

What does change the bill is preparation. One retake costs £23, which is 5 times the £4.99 price of the official DVSA revision app and more than the £15 print book. On the April 2025 to March 2026 figures for Peterborough, the average candidate here needs 2.37 sittings, so budgeting for one attempt and nothing else is optimistic. Set against the wider learner bill, with lessons at about £38 an hour on this site's South East band, the closest published row to East of England, the theory fee is 3.7% of the £1,470 minimum.

Across the East of England as a whole, DVSA recorded 270,776 car theory tests at 18 centres over the same twelve months, a pass rate of 45.81% and £50.21 of fees per pass. Peterborough is below that regional figure by 3.56 points.