Paisley test centre: 48.6% pass rate, £379 to get through it.

7,912 candidates took the car practical test at Paisley during 2025/26 and 3,847 of them passed, a pass rate of 48.6%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 214th of 308 on pass rate, and 54th of 67 inside Scotland.

That lands within 1.4 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 0.7 points below the 49.3% Scotland average, which makes Paisley an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 48.6% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.06 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Paisley pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.06 times, or £128. Add 1.06 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £252. The test cycle at Paisley is therefore about £379. Testing here therefore costs about £17 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.

A fail at Paisley costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 13.7 weeks in July 2026, 1.8 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.06 expected retakes that is about 14.5 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 2,575 standard slots inside the booking window here and 3.5% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 3,960 candidates sat their first test at Paisley and 1,865 passed, 47.1%, which is 1.5 points below the all-attempts rate. 31 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 0.78% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Paisley has fallen by 6.1 points, from 54.7% to 48.6%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 4,654 to 7,912 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £69 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Paisley, 49.0% against 48.2%. Automatic tests made up 23.5% of the workload and passed at 44.0%, 4.6 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 43.3% in November 2025 to 53.0% in March 2026, a 9.6-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 Paisley 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.