Hamilton test centre: 42.0% pass rate, £476 to get through it.

Over 2025/26 the examiners at Hamilton conducted 6,112 car practical tests and issued 2,567 passes. The resulting 42.0% makes it a mid-sized centre sitting 284th of 308 on the national pass-rate table and 63rd of 67 in Scotland.

That is 8.0 percentage points below the 50.03% national figure, and 7.3 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 42.0% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 2.38 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Hamilton pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 2.38 times, or £148. Add 1.38 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £329. The test cycle at Hamilton is therefore about £476. Testing here therefore costs about £114 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 Hamilton costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 17.6 weeks in July 2026, 5.7 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 1.38 expected retakes that is about 24.3 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 1,964 standard slots inside the booking window here and 4.8% of them were still free to book.

The first-attempt picture is harder here than the headline. 2,969 candidates sat their first test at Hamilton and 1,209 passed, 40.7%, which is 1.3 points below the all-attempts rate. 43 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 1.45% of them. Budget for the second booking from the start rather than treating it as the exception.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Hamilton has fallen by 9.8 points, from 51.8% to 42.0%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 3,364 to 6,112 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £135 to the average candidate.

Male and female candidates are within a point of each other at Hamilton, 41.9% against 42.1%. Automatic tests made up 22.7% of the workload and passed at 34.5%, 7.5 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 37.1% in June 2025 to 45.7% in July 2025, a 8.6-point swing that shows how little a single month proves.

Among centres of a similar size in Scotland, Bishopbriggs runs 7.8 points higher at 49.8%. On the same arithmetic that is roughly £112 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.