Greenock test centre: 41.7% pass rate, £481 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Greenock conducted 3,547 car practical tests and issued 1,479 passes. The resulting 41.7% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 285th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 64th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 8.3 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 7.6 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 41.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.40 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Greenock pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.40 times, or £149. Add 1.40 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £333. The test cycle at Greenock is therefore about £481. Testing here therefore costs about £119 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.

Waiting time at Greenock ran to a median 9 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 2.9 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 1.40 expected retakes that is roughly 12.6 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,758 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.5% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 1,469 candidates sat their first test at Greenock and 595 passed, 40.5%, which is 1.2 points below the all-attempts rate. 18 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.23% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Greenock has fallen by 1.9 points, from 43.6% to 41.7%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,492 to 3,547 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £31 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 40.6% and female candidates at 43.5%, a gap of 3.0 points across 2,203 and 1,344 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.6% of the workload and passed at 35.9%, 5.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 38.1% in May 2025 to 50.6% in March 2026, a 12.5-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Dundee runs 15.6 points higher at 57.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £196 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.