Buckie test centre: 51.1% pass rate, £349 to get through it.

Buckie is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 268 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 137 were passes, giving 51.1%. At that volume a run of two or three unusual weeks moves the annual figure visibly, so treat the number as a guide to the roads rather than a precise ranking. It sits 177th of 308 nationally and 47th of 67 in Scotland.

That lands within 1.1 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.8 points above the 49.3% Scotland average, which makes Buckie an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 51.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.96 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Buckie pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.96 times, or £121. Add 0.96 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £228. The test cycle at Buckie is therefore about £349. That is within £13 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Buckie is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Buckie was 6 weeks in July 2026, 5.9 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.96 expected retakes add only around 5.7 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 56 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.0% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 149 candidates sat their first test at Buckie and 69 passed, 46.3%, which is 4.8 points below the all-attempts rate. 7 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.70% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Buckie has fallen by 8.4 points, from 59.6% to 51.1%. Volume has been steady, 277 tests then against 268 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £83 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 58.2% and female candidates at 45.2%, a gap of 13.0 points across 122 and 146 tests. Month to month the rate ran from 62.5% in August 2025 to 66.7% in May 2025, a 4.2-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Banff runs 6.4 points higher at 57.5%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £65 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.