Dunoon test centre: 71.5% pass rate, £182 to get through it.

Dunoon is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 193 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 138 were passes, giving 71.5%. 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 5th of 308 nationally and 5th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 21.5 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 22.2 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 71.5% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.40 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Dunoon pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.40 times, or £87. Add 0.40 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £95. The test cycle at Dunoon is therefore about £182. Testing here therefore saves about £180 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 Dunoon. DVSA recorded a median wait of 21.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 9.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.40 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 8.4 extra weeks of waiting, close to 2 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 58 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 96 passes from 133 first tests at Dunoon, 72.2% against 71.5% for all attempts. 5 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.76% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Dunoon has risen by 12.9 points, from 58.6% to 71.5%. Test volume has shrunk over the same span, from 297 to 193 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £92 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 67.6% and female candidates at 76.8%, a gap of 9.3 points across 111 and 82 tests. Automatic tests made up 19.7% of the workload and passed at 60.5%, 11.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 66.7% in September 2025 to 72.0% in July 2025, a 5.3-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 Dunoon 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.