Forfar test centre: 60.3% pass rate, £260 to get through it.

Forfar is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 667 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 402 were passes, giving 60.3%. 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 42nd of 308 nationally and 24th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 10.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 10.9 points above the 49.3% Scotland 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 60.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.66 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Forfar pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.66 times, or £103. Add 0.66 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £157. The test cycle at Forfar is therefore about £260. Testing here therefore saves about £102 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

The queue is the expensive part at Forfar. DVSA recorded a median wait of 24.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 12.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.66 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 15.9 extra weeks of waiting, close to 4 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 244 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.7% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 252 passes from 424 first tests at Forfar, 59.4% against 60.3% for all attempts. 18 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 4.25% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Forfar has fallen by 8.6 points, from 68.8% to 60.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 449 to 667 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £62 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 62.7% and female candidates at 58.1%, a gap of 4.5 points across 311 and 356 tests. Automatic tests made up 16.0% of the workload and passed at 56.1%, 4.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.4% in September 2025 to 71.0% in April 2025, a 19.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Montrose runs 9.8 points higher at 70.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £69 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.