Oban test centre: 66.2% pass rate, £216 to get through it.

Oban is a very small centre by DVSA standards: 322 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 213 were passes, giving 66.2%. 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 19th of 308 nationally and 15th of 67 in Scotland.

That is 16.1 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 16.8 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 66.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.51 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Oban pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.51 times, or £94. Add 0.51 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £122. The test cycle at Oban is therefore about £216. Testing here therefore saves about £146 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

A fail at Oban costs time as well as money. The median wait between booking and testing was 15.4 weeks in July 2026, 3.5 weeks above the 11.9-week national median. At 0.51 expected retakes that is about 7.9 weeks of additional queueing, and most learners keep paying for an hour or two a month through it. In the same month DVSA offered 117 standard slots inside the booking window here and 0.0% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 124 passes from 187 first tests at Oban, 66.3% against 66.2% for all attempts. 14 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 7.49% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Oban has risen by 3.3 points, from 62.8% to 66.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 269 to 322 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £24 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 62.6% and female candidates at 69.8%, a gap of 7.2 points across 163 and 159 tests. Month to month the rate ran from 55.6% in August 2025 to 85.2% in February 2026, a 29.6-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 Oban 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.