Dunfermline (Vine) test centre: 36.4% pass rate, £586 to get through it.

5,529 candidates took the car practical test at Dunfermline (Vine) during 2025/26 and 2,012 of them passed, a pass rate of 36.4%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 305th of 308 on pass rate, and 67th of 67 inside Scotland.

That is 13.6 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 12.9 points below the 49.3% average for Scotland. Low pass rates cluster where test routes carry heavy traffic, multi-lane junctions and frequent bus lanes. The examiners are not stricter; the roads give a candidate more chances to make a serious fault.

Turn 36.4% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.75 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Dunfermline (Vine) pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.75 times, or £170. Add 1.75 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £416. The test cycle at Dunfermline (Vine) is therefore about £586. Testing here therefore costs about £224 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 Dunfermline (Vine) costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.1 weeks in July 2026, 3.2 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.75 expected retakes that is about 26.4 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,873 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.8% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 902 passes from 2,477 first tests at Dunfermline (Vine), 36.4% against 36.4% for all attempts. 64 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 2.58% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Dunfermline (Vine) has fallen by 15.9 points, from 52.3% to 36.4%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 2,551 to 5,529 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £251 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 33.3% and female candidates at 40.6%, a gap of 7.2 points across 3,197 and 2,332 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.5% of the workload and passed at 30.0%, 6.4 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 30.8% in October 2025 to 41.5% in April 2025, a 10.7-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Hamilton runs 5.6 points higher at 42.0%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £110 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.