Alness test centre: 63.1% pass rate, £238 to get through it.

Alness is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 783 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 494 were passes, giving 63.1%. 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 31st of 308 nationally and 21st of 67 in Scotland.

That is 13.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 13.8 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 63.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.59 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Alness pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.59 times, or £98. Add 0.59 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £139. The test cycle at Alness is therefore about £238. Testing here therefore saves about £124 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Alness costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 14.9 weeks in July 2026, 3.0 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.59 expected retakes that is about 8.7 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 146 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 313 passes from 496 first tests at Alness, 63.1% against 63.1% for all attempts. 31 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 6.25% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Alness has risen by 1.7 points, from 61.4% to 63.1%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 1,008 to 783 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £13 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Alness, 62.7% against 63.5%. Automatic tests made up 12.5% of the workload and passed at 60.2%, 2.9 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 56.7% in December 2025 to 74.6% in April 2025, a 17.9-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Montrose runs 7.0 points higher at 70.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £47 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.