Girvan test centre: 72.0% pass rate, £179 to get through it.

Girvan is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 250 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 180 were passes, giving 72.0%. 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 3rd of 308 nationally and 3rd of 67 in Scotland.

That is 22.0 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 22.7 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 72.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.39 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Girvan pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.39 times, or £86. Add 0.39 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £93. The test cycle at Girvan is therefore about £179. Testing here therefore saves about £183 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 Girvan. DVSA recorded a median wait of 19.9 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 8.0 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.39 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 7.7 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 99 standard slots inside the booking window here and 9.1% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 158 candidates sat their first test at Girvan and 111 passed, 70.3%, which is 1.8 points below the all-attempts rate. 5 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.16% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Girvan has risen by 12.2 points, from 59.8% to 72.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 189 to 250 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £85 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 69.8% and female candidates at 74.2%, a gap of 4.3 points across 126 and 124 tests. Automatic tests made up 26.4% of the workload and passed at 66.7%, 5.3 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 63.0% in July 2025 to 82.6% in September 2025, a 19.6-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 Girvan 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.