Norwich Theory Test Centre: 47.61% pass rate

DVSA recorded 21,224 car theory tests at Norwich between April 2025 and March 2026, of which 10,104 were passes and 11,120 were fails. The pass rate was 47.61%, against 44.84% across Great Britain. That is the 52nd highest pass rate of the 165 centres with enough tests to compare, and 4th of 13 in the East of England. Norwich is a high-volume centre, working through roughly 1,769 sittings a month.

Every theory pass at Norwich takes 2.10 sittings on average, so £48.31 of DVSA fees, a little under the £51.29 national figure. None of that is a difference in price. DVSA charges £23 a sitting everywhere, and there is no discount for a retake, so the only thing that moves the bill is the number of attempts. The 11,120 fails recorded at Norwich account for £256k of the £488k paid in fees here.

The recorded gender split opens a wide gap between the two groups at Norwich: 51.59% for the 9,416 tests sat by women and 44.43% for the 11,808 sat by men, against a national gap of 4.20 points. That works out at roughly £7.18 of fee difference per licence.

Month to month the rate moves about. February 2026 was the strongest month here at 50.5%, December 2025 the weakest at 45.5%, and May 2025 the busiest with 1,977 sittings. A swing of 5.0 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. Norwich slipped 0.99 points from 2024/25, and across the 13 years DVSA publishes for this centre the rate has moved from 68.30% in 2007/08 to 47.61% now. Applying today's £23 fee to both, the expected cost of a pass has gone from £33.67 to £48.31.

The nearest other theory centre is Diss, about 19 miles away, where the rate was 50.77%. None of the five nearest centres records a higher rate than Norwich, so there is nothing to chase even on paper. The questions, the clips and the pass mark are set nationally and do not vary by building, so a centre's rate describes the people who booked there rather than the difficulty of the test.

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 Norwich, the average candidate here needs 2.10 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 3.3% 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. Norwich is above that regional figure by 1.80 points.