Fort William test centre: 65.5% pass rate, £220 to get through it.

Fort William is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 374 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 245 were passes, giving 65.5%. 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 21st of 308 nationally and 17th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 15.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 16.2 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 65.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.53 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Fort William pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.53 times, or £95. Add 0.53 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £125. The test cycle at Fort William is therefore about £220. Testing here therefore saves about £142 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Fort William costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.6 weeks in July 2026, 3.7 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.53 expected retakes that is about 8.2 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 154 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.0% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 247 first attempts at Fort William, 171 passed, a rate of 69.2%, which is 3.7 points above the all-attempts figure. 19 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 7.69% 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 Fort William has risen by 6.7 points, from 58.8% to 65.5%. Volume has been steady, 362 tests then against 374 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £52 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 66.3% and female candidates at 64.6%, a gap of 1.8 points across 199 and 175 tests. Month to month the rate ran from 53.9% in June 2025 to 77.1% in January 2026, a 23.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

None of the similarly sized centres in Scotland runs more than five points ahead of Fort William 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.