Lanark test centre: 58.1% pass rate, £278 to get through it.

Lanark is a small centre by DVSA standards: 1,914 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 1,112 were passes, giving 58.1%. 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 62nd of 308 nationally and 28th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 8.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 8.8 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 58.1% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.72 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Lanark pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.72 times, or £107. Add 0.72 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £172. The test cycle at Lanark is therefore about £278. Testing here therefore saves about £84 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 Lanark. DVSA recorded a median wait of 20.4 weeks between booking and taking a test in July 2026, 8.5 weeks longer than the 11.9-week median across all centres. Multiply that by the 0.72 expected retakes and a candidate here is looking at roughly 14.7 extra weeks of waiting, close to 3 months of insurance, lesson top-ups and a licence still not in the post. In the same month DVSA offered 589 standard slots inside the booking window here and 2.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 603 passes from 1,030 first tests at Lanark, 58.5% against 58.1% for all attempts. 39 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 3.79% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Lanark has risen by 1.1 points, from 57.0% to 58.1%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 1,569 to 1,914 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £10 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 57.2% and female candidates at 59.1%, a gap of 1.8 points across 1,015 and 899 tests. Automatic tests made up 17.3% of the workload and passed at 47.1%, 11.0 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 49.0% in November 2025 to 64.4% in February 2026, a 15.4-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 Lanark 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.