Ipswich test centre: 62.3% pass rate, £252 to get through it.

Ipswich is a high-volume centre, putting 11,466 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 7,143 passed, so the centre finished the year on 62.3% and 33rd of 308 nationally, 1st of 24 within East of England.

That is 12.3 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 10.9 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 62.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.61 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Ipswich pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.61 times, or £100. Add 0.61 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 £152. The test cycle at Ipswich is therefore about £252. Testing here therefore saves about £124 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Ipswich ran to a median 8 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 3.9 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.61 expected retakes that is roughly 4.8 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 2,700 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 4,099 passes from 6,504 first tests at Ipswich, 63.0% against 62.3% for all attempts. 550 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 8.46% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Ipswich has risen by 3.8 points, from 58.5% to 62.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 7,181 to 11,466 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £33 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Ipswich, 62.2% against 62.5%. Automatic tests made up 23.6% of the workload and passed at 56.4%, 5.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 59.9% in July 2025 to 64.8% in January 2026, a 4.9-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 Ipswich 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.