Grangemouth test centre: 50.7% pass rate, £354 to get through it.

3,761 candidates took the car practical test at Grangemouth during 2025/26 and 1,906 of them passed, a pass rate of 50.7%. That is a mid-sized centre, ranked 190th of 308 on pass rate, and 49th of 67 inside Scotland.

That lands within 0.7 percentage points of the 50.03% national figure and 1.3 points above the 49.3% Scotland average, which makes Grangemouth an ordinary centre on the DVSA table and puts the cost question back on preparation rather than location.

Turn 50.7% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.97 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Grangemouth pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.97 times, or £122. Add 0.97 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £232. The test cycle at Grangemouth is therefore about £354. That is within £8 of what the same cycle costs at a centre on the national average, so Grangemouth is close to cost-neutral as a choice.

The queue is the expensive part at Grangemouth. DVSA recorded a median wait of 23.1 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 11.2 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.97 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 22.5 extra weeks of waiting, close to 5 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 1,104 standard slots inside the booking window here and 5.8% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 1,072 passes from 2,127 first tests at Grangemouth, 50.4% against 50.7% for all attempts. 73 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.43% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Grangemouth has fallen by 2.1 points, from 52.8% to 50.7%. Volume has been steady, 3,353 tests then against 3,761 now. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £24 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Grangemouth, 51.1% against 50.2%. Automatic tests made up 14.2% of the workload and passed at 40.0%, 10.7 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 46.9% in July 2025 to 54.5% in December 2025, a 7.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Dundee runs 6.6 points higher at 57.3%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £68 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.