Peebles test centre: 58.8% pass rate, £272 to get through it.

Peebles is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 685 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 403 were passes, giving 58.8%. 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 53rd of 308 nationally and 27th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 8.8 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 9.5 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 58.8% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.70 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Peebles pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.70 times, or £105. Add 0.70 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £167. The test cycle at Peebles is therefore about £272. Testing here therefore saves about £90 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 Peebles. DVSA recorded a median wait of 22 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 10.1 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.70 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 15.4 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 330 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.3% of them were still free to book.

First-timers do better than the headline suggests. Of 382 first attempts at Peebles, 241 passed, a rate of 63.1%, which is 4.3 points above the all-attempts figure. 7 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.83% 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 Peebles has fallen by 14.8 points, from 73.7% to 58.8%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 224 to 685 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £103 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 56.6% and female candidates at 61.4%, a gap of 4.9 points across 366 and 319 tests. Automatic tests made up 21.6% of the workload and passed at 38.5%, 20.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 50.0% in March 2026 to 68.3% in January 2026, a 18.3-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Montrose runs 11.2 points higher at 70.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £82 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.