Peterhead test centre: 53.2% pass rate, £326 to get through it.

Peterhead is a small centre by DVSA standards: 2,628 car practical tests in 2025/26, of which 1,399 were passes, giving 53.2%. 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 128th of 308 nationally and 43rd of 67 in Scotland.

That is 3.2 percentage points above the 50.03% recorded across all 317 centres, and 3.9 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 53.2% into money. One divided by the pass rate gives 1.88 expected attempts before a first pass, so the average candidate at Peterhead pays the £62 weekday DVSA fee about 1.88 times, or £116. Add 0.88 expected retakes at 7 hours of extra tuition each, charged at the Scotland rate of £34 an hour, and the extra lessons come to £209. The test cycle at Peterhead is therefore about £326. Testing here therefore saves about £36 against a centre sitting on the 50.03% national average, because the higher pass rate buys back part of an attempt.

Waiting time at Peterhead ran to a median 7.4 weeks between booking and test in July 2026, 4.5 weeks below the 11.9-week national median. Across 0.88 expected retakes that is roughly 6.5 weeks of extra queueing before a licence arrives. In the same month DVSA offered 1,085 standard slots inside the booking window here and 38.2% of them were still free to book.

First attempts track the headline closely: 628 passes from 1,179 first tests at Peterhead, 53.3% against 53.2% for all attempts. 67 of those first tests were passed with no driving faults recorded at all, 5.68% of them.

Since 2021/22 the pass rate at Peterhead has fallen by 13.4 points, from 66.6% to 53.2%. Test volume has grown over the same span, from 1,174 to 2,628 tests a year. On the cost model above, that shift alone is worth about £113 to the average candidate.

Male candidates passed at 52.2% and female candidates at 54.9%, a gap of 2.7 points across 1,624 and 1,004 tests. Automatic tests made up 20.9% of the workload and passed at 41.1%, 12.2 points below the manual-inclusive rate, worth knowing before paying the automatic lesson premium. Month to month the rate ran from 45.3% in March 2026 to 64.7% in July 2025, a 19.4-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 Peterhead 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.