Edinburgh (Currie) test centre: 41.5% pass rate, £484 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Edinburgh (Currie) conducted 6,202 car practical tests and issued 2,577 passes. The resulting 41.5% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 287th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 65th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 8.5 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 7.8 points below the 49.3% average for Scotland. 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 41.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.41 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Edinburgh (Currie) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.41 times, or £149. Add 1.41 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £335. The test cycle at Edinburgh (Currie) is therefore about £484. Testing here therefore costs about £122 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.

The queue is the expensive part at Edinburgh (Currie). DVSA recorded a median wait of 23 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 1.41 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 32.4 extra weeks of waiting, close to 7 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 2,246 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.3% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 3,427 first attempts at Edinburgh (Currie), 1,466 passed, a rate of 42.8%, which is 1.2 points above the all-attempts figure. 60 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.75% of them. The gap says the candidates arriving well prepared are getting through, and the all-attempts rate is being pulled down by repeat attempts.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Edinburgh (Currie) has fallen by 12.5 points, from 54.1% to 41.5%. Volume has been steady, 6,373 tests then against 6,202 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £167 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 41.0% and female candidates at 42.3%, a gap of 1.3 points across 3,406 and 2,796 tests. Automatic tests made up 27.1% of the workload and passed at 36.0%, 5.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 35.8% in July 2025 to 46.3% in March 2026, a 10.4-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Bishopbriggs runs 8.2 points higher at 49.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £119 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.