Orkney test centre: 55.9% pass rate, £298 to get through it.

Orkney is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 320 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 179 were passes, giving 55.9%. 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 92nd of 308 nationally and 38th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 5.9 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 6.6 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 55.9% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.79 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Orkney pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.79 times, or £111. Add 0.79 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £187. The test cycle at Orkney is therefore about £298. Testing here therefore saves about £64 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Booking is the one thing that is not painful here. The median wait between booking and taking a test at Orkney was 6.9 weeks in July 2026, 5.0 weeks shorter than the 11.9-week median, so the 0.79 expected retakes add only around 5.4 weeks in total. A short queue makes a fail cheaper in practice, because it cuts the months of drift where skills fade and lessons restart. In the same month DVSA offered 41 standard slots inside the booking window here and 22.0% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 197 candidates sat their first test at Orkney and 101 passed, 51.3%, which is 4.7 points below the all-attempts rate. 4 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.03% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Orkney has fallen by 11.6 points, from 67.6% to 55.9%. Volume has been steady, 333 tests then against 320 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £92 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 59.0% and female candidates at 52.8%, a gap of 6.2 points across 161 and 159 tests. Automatic tests made up 9.4% of the workload and passed at 40.0%, 15.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 50.0% in May 2025 to 67.7% in February 2026, a 17.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Oban runs 10.2 points higher at 66.2%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £83 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.