Lowestoft(Mobbs Way) test centre: 43.3% pass rate, £473 to get through it.

Lowestoft(Mobbs Way) is a mid-sized centre, putting 7,603 candidates through the car practical test in 2025/26. 3,292 passed, so the centre finished the year on 43.3% and 274th of 308 nationally, 23rd of 24 within East of England.

That is 6.7 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 8.1 points below the 51.4% average for East of England. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 43.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.31 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Lowestoft(Mobbs Way) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.31 times, or £143. Add 1.31 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 £330. The test cycle at Lowestoft(Mobbs Way) is therefore about £473. Testing here therefore costs about £97 more than the same candidate would spend at a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, purely because of the extra attempt the pass rate implies.

A fail at Lowestoft(Mobbs Way) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 14.1 weeks in July 2026, 2.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.31 expected retakes that is about 18.5 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,269 standard slots inside the booking window here and 6.3% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,497 passes from 3,394 first tests at Lowestoft(Mobbs Way), 44.1% against 43.3% for all attempts. 77 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.27% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Lowestoft(Mobbs Way) has fallen by 1.6 points, from 44.9% to 43.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 5,092 to 7,603 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £25 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 41.9% and female candidates at 45.3%, a gap of 3.4 points across 4,387 and 3,216 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.6% of the workload and passed at 35.2%, 8.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 37.1% in November 2025 to 48.7% in March 2026, a 11.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in East of England, Leighton Buzzard (Stanbridge Road) runs 6.6 points higher at 49.9%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £96 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.