Kelso test centre: 59.2% pass rate, £269 to get through it.

Kelso is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 434 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 257 were passes, giving 59.2%. 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 51st of 308 nationally and 26th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 9.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 9.9 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 59.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.69 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Kelso pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.69 times, or £105. Add 0.69 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £164. The test cycle at Kelso is therefore about £269. Testing here therefore saves about £93 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 Kelso. DVSA recorded a median wait of 22.9 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.0 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.69 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 15.8 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 118 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.9% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 143 passes from 241 first tests at Kelso, 59.3% against 59.2% for all attempts. 9 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.73% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Kelso has fallen by 10.9 points, from 70.1% to 59.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 244 to 434 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £79 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 58.3% and female candidates at 60.1%, a gap of 1.8 points across 206 and 228 tests. Automatic tests made up 27.9% of the workload and passed at 45.5%, 13.8 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 51.1% in July 2025 to 72.1% in January 2026, a 21.0-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Hawick runs 5.1 points higher at 64.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £40 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.