Lerwick test centre: 67.8% pass rate, £204 to get through it.

Lerwick is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 379 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 257 were passes, giving 67.8%. 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 15th of 308 nationally and 11th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 17.8 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 18.5 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 67.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.47 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Lerwick pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.47 times, or £91. Add 0.47 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £113. The test cycle at Lerwick is therefore about £204. Testing here therefore saves about £158 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Lerwick ran to a median 9.1 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 2.8 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.47 expected retakes that is roughly 4.3 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 33 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 239 first attempts at Lerwick, 168 passed, a rate of 70.3%, which is 2.5 points above the all-attempts figure. 15 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.28% 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 Lerwick has fallen by 5.5 points, from 73.3% to 67.8%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 483 to 379 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £33 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 66.5% and female candidates at 69.6%, a gap of 3.1 points across 218 and 161 tests. Automatic tests made up 15.6% of the workload and passed at 62.7%, 5.1 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 58.5% in August 2025 to 76.1% in December 2025, a 17.6-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 Lerwick 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.