Duns test centre: 70.2% pass rate, £189 to get through it.

Duns is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 171 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 120 were passes, giving 70.2%. 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 7th of 308 nationally and 7th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 20.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 20.8 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 70.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.42 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Duns pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.42 times, or £88. Add 0.42 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £101. The test cycle at Duns is therefore about £189. Testing here therefore saves about £173 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 Duns. DVSA recorded a median wait of 22.4 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 10.5 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.42 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 9.5 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 38 standard slots inside the booking window here and 10.5% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 72 passes from 104 first tests at Duns, 69.2% against 70.2% for all attempts. 4 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.85% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Duns has fallen by 4.0 points, from 74.1% to 70.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 116 to 171 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £23 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 67.4% and female candidates at 73.4%, a gap of 6.0 points across 92 and 79 tests. Automatic tests made up 17.5% of the workload and passed at 56.7%, 13.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium.

None of the similarly sized centres in Scotland runs more than five points ahead of Duns 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.