Inveraray test centre: 69.3% pass rate, £195 to get through it.

Inveraray is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 124 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 86 were passes, giving 69.3%. 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 11th of 308 nationally and 9th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 19.3 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 20.0 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 69.3% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.44 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Inveraray pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.44 times, or £89. Add 0.44 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £105. The test cycle at Inveraray is therefore about £195. Testing here therefore saves about £167 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 Inveraray. DVSA recorded a median wait of 20.9 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 9.0 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.44 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 9.2 extra weeks of waiting, close to 2 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 56 standard slots inside the booking window here and 1.8% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 69 first attempts at Inveraray, 52 passed, a rate of 75.4%, which is 6.0 points above the all-attempts figure. 17 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 24.64% 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 Inveraray has fallen by 6.0 points, from 75.3% to 69.3%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 81 to 124 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £34 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 74.6% and female candidates at 63.2%, a gap of 11.5 points across 67 and 57 tests.

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