Booking the Saudi SVP (Takamol) Test From Pakistan: The Official Fee, the 108 Trades, and the Centre List

If you are booking the Saudi Skills Verification Program test from Pakistan - the test almost everyone calls the Takamol test - these are the figures the National Vocational and Technical Training Commission (NAVTTC) publishes on its own Takamol page:

• The assessment fee is USD 85 per test, which NAVTTC gives as PKR 23,500-24,500, subject to prevailing exchange rates.
• That fee has applied since 9 September 2026.
• You pay it online through the SVP portal. NAVTTC describes no other payment route.
• Skill verification is available in 108 approved trades.
• There are 62 centres nationwide, 44 of them active.

If you have already sat it and failed, the attempt rules are in our guide to failing the SVP test. Every one of those numbers is on a government page, and almost none of them appear on the booking sites that rank above it.

NAVTTC's Takamol page states the assessment fee as USD 85 per test (equivalent to PKR 23,500-24,500, subject to prevailing exchange rates), effective from 09 September 2026. The rupee figure is a range, not a price, because it tracks the rate on the day you pay.

Three other numbers circulate, and it is worth knowing where each comes from:

The fee is only one line of the bill. The medical, the attestation of your certificates and the visa stamping all sit alongside it - see what a Saudi work visa actually costs and who pays each part. The practical consequence: if someone asks you for cash, a bank transfer, or anything materially above USD 85 per test, they are not charging you the government fee. A documented scam pattern in several sending countries is an "agent" who charges a multiple of the official fee for a booking you can make yourself on the portal.

The portal charges every candidate outside Saudi Arabia the same USD 85 (PACC SVP FAQ), by Visa or Mastercard. What reaches your bank statement depends on the rate on the day. Only Pakistan has an official local figure; the others below are our arithmetic at Wise's mid-market rates on 13 October 2026, before your bank's own margin.

That table also explains a quote you will meet on booking sites: PKR 19,000 or 20,000. It matches neither fee. ARY News put the old USD 50 at about Rs14,100 in January 2026, and NAVTTC puts the new USD 85 at PKR 23,500-24,500. A quote below the official fee is as much a warning sign as one above it: the portal charges USD 85, so a lower figure cannot be the whole fee, whoever is quoting it.

A worked example for a single Pakistani candidate: the fee is PKR 23,500-24,500; the card charge is whatever your bank adds; the trip to the allocated centre depends on your city. If the first attempt fails, the second is charged in full again - the attempt arithmetic is in the guide to failing, linked above.

NAVTTC links candidates to https://svp-international.pacc.sa/auth/register to register on the SVP portal. That address now redirects to svp-international.qiwa.sa, which is where you will actually land. It is the Professional Accreditation Center (PACC) system run by Takamol, the Saudi side of the program, and it is where the fee is paid and the appointment slip is generated.

The sequence, as the official pages describe it:

1. Register on the SVP portal with your passport details.
2. Select your trade from the approved list, then a city. NAVTTC's page also mentions choosing a date; the official SVP user guide (version 7, November 2025) says the time and the centre are assigned "automatically and randomly". The sources disagree, so do not count on picking either.
3. Pay the USD 85 assessment fee online.
4. Download the appointment slip the system generates. That slip, and your original passport, are what you take to the centre.

You do not need an Absher account for any of this - Absher comes later, once you are in the Kingdom and have an iqama. Note what is not in that list: no agent, no local bank, and no separate NAVTTC fee described alongside the USD 85. The screen-by-screen version, with the two fields that cannot be corrected later, is set out below.

This is the sequence in the official SVP International user guide (version 7, November 2025), which the portal itself links to. The guide's screenshots still show USD 50, because they were made before the fee rose.

1. Sign up. Upload your passport and enter your first name, last name and passport number. Check the number twice: it cannot be changed later, and it is the passport number, not the serial number.
2. Finish the profile. Upload a personal photo, add your ID number and education level, and set a password.
3. Verify. Confirm the one-time code sent to your email or phone, then sign in.
4. Start Verification and choose your occupation. It must match your visa exactly, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs verifies the occupation code. A wrong choice cannot be changed.
5. Choose the method. In person at a centre, online with remote proctoring, or RPL (a document review) - only the ones your country offers for your occupation appear.
6. Choose the city, then the language. Nine languages exist, but you pick from those offered for your trade.
7. Accept the centre and time you are given. They are assigned automatically and randomly.
8. Review and pay USD 85 by Visa or Mastercard. Mada is not accepted on the international portal, and no cash, bank deposit or agent payment route is described anywhere.
9. Print the ticket that arrives by email or SMS. That ticket and your original passport are what you take on the day.

Do one check before step 4. On pacc.qiwa.sa, search the occupation written on your visa and select Pakistan. If it shows as "activated", expect to need the test; 855 occupations were activated for Pakistan on 13 October 2026, out of 1,250 in the catalogue. If it is not activated, the official FAQ says the test is not required.

If the occupation on your visa looks wrong for the work you will actually do, fix that before you pay - it is the one thing the portal will not let you correct afterwards, and it follows you onto your iqama. Wathim's desk handles Saudi work visa and profession paperwork: brief the desk with the visa details and we will tell you what the occupation means for you.

Your certificate is tied to your passport. A name entered on the booking in a different form from the one printed on your passport - a dropped middle name, a different transliteration, initials instead of a full name - is the kind of mismatch that can stop you at the door on the day, with the fee already paid and non-refundable.

Two fields are worse than the name, because the portal says they cannot be changed at all. The passport number is fixed once you register, and the user guide warns you to enter the passport number, not the passport's serial number. The occupation cannot be changed if it is chosen incorrectly (PACC SVP FAQ), and it has to match the occupation on your visa because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs checks the code.

NAVTTC's page says an unsuccessful candidate may re-book a new appointment via the SVP portal. It says nothing at all about refunds. Treat the booking screen as if the passport is the only spelling that exists.

Everything the official sources ask for, in the order you will need it:

Note what is not on the list: no medical, no NAVTTC form and no agent's letter. The medical is a separate clearance at a different stage of the visa, not part of the test. The employer's half of the paperwork - the visa request your occupation comes from - is in the Saudi new-hire work permit checklist.

If you are going the RPL route, the certificate has to survive verification - RPL documents suspected of forgery are rejected. Getting it through attestation for Saudi Arabia before you upload it is the safer order.

NAVTTC states that skill verification is available in 108 approved trades, grouped into occupation groups that include Automotive, Mechanical, Culinary Arts and Food, Civil and Construction, Driving, and others.

It also names the sectors where the volume actually is: Civil and Construction, Driving, and Services and Cleaning, which NAVTTC says account for the majority of assessments "based on actual Takamol assessment data".

Driving sitting in the top three is worth a moment - we come back to it below. A large share of workers going through the Saudi trade test are going into driving work - which is a separate test, under a separate authority, with its own theory paper once they are in the Kingdom.

NAVTTC reports 62 centres nationwide, 44 of them active. The distinction matters when you are choosing a city: a centre existing is not the same as a centre taking appointments, and the portal's own city filter is the only live answer.

Cities that appear in that filter include:

Bhakkar, Choa Saidan Shah, Dina, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Haripur, Islamabad, Karachi, Karachi Central, Lahore, Lower Dir, Mandra, Mohmand Agency, Multan, Peshawar, Quetta, Rawalpindi, Sahiwal, Sargodha, Sheikhupura, Skardu, Swabi and Wah.

That is a wider spread than the "Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad" most agent pages list, and the difference is a domestic flight or a night bus.

The Saudi side counts differently again. The portal's public centre list, fetched on 13 October 2026, shows 53 centres for Pakistan rather than 62: Islamabad 10, Lahore 8, Rawalpindi 6, Multan 4, Peshawar 3, Karachi 3 and the rest spread across smaller cities. They include Government Colleges of Technology, vocational training institutes, NUST's College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, the NAVTTC Centre of Excellence, the National Skills University and City Traffic Police driving assessment centres. Neither list says which centres are taking appointments this week.

One consequence is easy to miss: Karachi, the largest city, has only three centres on the Saudi list against Islamabad's ten. You choose the city; you do not choose the centre. NAVTTC says the system allocates an approved centre automatically, and the official user guide says the allocation is random. An agent offering you a "particular" or "easy" centre is not describing the official process.

The SVP is not a formality. The pass mark on the SVP International portal's exam instructions is 50%, the test is computer-based and, for some occupations, computer-based plus a practical marked by an assessor. Pass the practical and fail the computer test and you retake the whole thing, because the two parts count together.

The number of questions is not published - the PACC FAQ says questions are random and vary between candidates - and the length is given as up to 120 minutes. Nine languages are offered at booking: Arabic, English, Hindi, Urdu, Filipino, Sinhala, Tamil, Bengali and Nepali.

If you fail, you get three attempts in total and pay the full fee each time. At USD 85 a sitting, three attempts is USD 255. We set out the attempt rules, the visa consequences and the certificate validity in the guide to failing the SVP test.

The PACC FAQ is specific about the documents, and it is the kind of specific that costs a fee when it is ignored:

• Your original passport. Inside the Kingdom, your original iqama instead. NAVTTC adds your CNIC for Pakistani candidates, and says no other documents are needed.
• The printed appointment slip the portal generated when you paid.
• Arrive 30 minutes early. The SVPI user guide says fifteen. Use the stricter figure - it is the one that cannot hurt you.

Two things are worth knowing in advance because neither is obvious from the booking screen.

First, if your occupation includes a practical, you are being marked by an assessor on a workbench, not answering questions about one. The assessor marks what you do, and the computer test and the practical count together as one result.

Second, the result is usually given at once, occasionally up to five days later (PACC SVP FAQ). NAVTTC says a successful result is uploaded to the portal within 24 hours. There is no interview, no appeal step described in any source we could read, and no partial pass carried forward.

NAVTTC's page is silent on this; the PACC FAQ and the portal text are not. The rules are tight, and they are the rules that most often turn a paid booking into a lost fee:

• Reschedule once, at least 72 hours before the test.
• Cancel once per paid booking, also at least 72 hours before. The money becomes account credit, not cash, and the credit can only be used for the same method - in-person credit for an in-person test.
• Do not turn up and you get nothing back. "The paid amount is non-refundable."
• If the centre cancels, the credit is returned to your account automatically.

The practical consequence of random allocation: you choose the city, not the centre, so look up the address on your ticket the day it arrives. If you cannot get there, the 72-hour reschedule is your only lever, and you get it once.

Inside the Kingdom the money works differently. The employer buys test packages on the SVP Local portal, priced excluding VAT, valid for a set number of months, non-refundable and tied to the establishment. The worker does not pay or reschedule; the employer does.

Not everyone has to sit anything. The SVP includes RPL - Recognition of Prior Learning - which the SVPI user guide describes as a document review rather than a test. Where your occupation and country allow it, your existing certificates and experience are assessed on paper.

Three things to understand before you assume it applies to you:

• It is not available for every occupation or every country, and the portal decides which route you are offered at booking.
• The certificate it produces is valid for two years, the same as a computer-only pass - not the five years a pass with a practical earns.
• Your documents still have to be real and verifiable. If your degree or trade certificate has not been through attestation, start there, because a document that cannot be verified is worse than no document.

If you are Filipino, the attestation chain is different again and set out in our guide to Filipino documents for Saudi Arabia.

The certificate is not the job. It is a condition that has to be satisfied before the work visa can proceed, and it then sits behind two things that matter later:

That middle row is where most of the later trouble lives. A certificate in one trade and a profession on the iqama in another is the mismatch that blocks licences, bank formalities and transfers - and it is a separate, slow correction, set out in fixing a wrong profession on your iqama.

When you do move employer, the transfer itself runs through Qiwa and is covered in the iqama transfer guide, with the refusal cases in what to do when Qiwa rejects the transfer.

NAVTTC names Driving as one of the three sectors that account for the majority of Takamol assessments. If that is you, passing the SVP is the first of two tests, not the only one.

Once you are in the Kingdom, driving on your own licence is a short-term arrangement. Converting to a Saudi licence means the theory test, and that is a different authority, a different syllabus and a different pass mark - 75%, against the SVP's 50%. The process, the conversion rules by country and what the test contains are in the Saudi driving licence guide and the GCC conversion comparison, and the theory questions themselves are in the Saudi theory paper pack.

Workers who plan for one test and meet two lose weeks. Plan for both - and if you would rather not run the conversion yourself, the Saudi driving licence service covers the paperwork.

The USD 85 is the part with an official number on it. These are the other lines that land on the same worker in the same few months, with the sources that publish them:

Once you are in the Kingdom, the recurring costs - iqama, levies, renewals - are a separate budget again, and the iqama cost calculator is the quickest way to see what your own case comes to. How Saudi work permit costs compare with the rest of the Gulf is on the work permit cost comparison.

You cannot revise a syllabus nobody publishes. What you can do is practise the format: multiple choice, on a computer, in your own language, under time, on the safety and method questions that every trade assessment leans on.

We wrote a free SVP practice test for exactly that - 39 original multiple-choice questions, untimed, each with the answer and the rule it comes from, marked at the authority's own 50%. There is nothing to sign up for. If you already know your trade, start with the short per-trade sets instead:

• Electrical work: 10 electrician questions - safe isolation, RCDs, breakers, bonding.
• Pipework: 10 plumber questions - drainage, backflow, pressure testing.
• Cooling: 10 HVAC/AC technician questions - refrigerant handling, charging, evacuation.
• Metalwork: 9 welder questions - hot work safety, defects, preheat.

The free sets are untimed. The real test runs up to 120 minutes, and sitting a long multiple-choice paper in a second language is a skill of its own. For that, our paid SVP practice bank has 200 original questions - 50 per trade for the same four trades - with a timed 40-question, 60-minute mock for each, marked at 50%, for AED 149 and 180 days of access. The 40-question length is our practice length, because the real count is not published, and the questions are written to general trade knowledge, not taken from any official pool - the official FAQ says none is published.

The full SVP guide sets out the format, the fees and who must sit it, with every figure attributed to the document it came from.

NAVTTC organises the approved trades into occupation groups rather than as a flat list. The groups named on its Takamol page include Automotive, Mechanical, Culinary Arts and Food, Civil and Construction, Driving and others, and the portal's own trade selector is the authoritative list at the moment you book.

Two practical points follow from the grouping.

First, the group decides whether a practical applies. Occupations where the work is physical and assessable on a bench are the ones that attract an assessor-marked practical - and those are also the ones whose certificate lasts five years rather than two. A longer certificate for a harder test is a reasonable trade, and it is worth knowing which one you are signing up for.

Second, the group has to match the job offer. The employer's visa request names an occupation. If the trade you verified in and the occupation on that request are not the same thing, the paperwork stalls at the point where the two records are compared - and that comparison happens after you have paid.

A documented pattern in several sending countries is an intermediary charging a multiple of the official assessment fee for a booking the candidate could make themselves. It persists because the official figure is harder to find than the agent's.

So, the official figures in one place, all from NAVTTC's own page: USD 85 per test, PKR 23,500-24,500 depending on the exchange rate, paid online through the SVP portal, effective 9 September 2026.

Three rules follow:

• If the payment is not going through the portal, it is not the assessment fee.
• If the quote is materially above USD 85 per test, the difference is somebody's margin, not a government charge.
• If someone offers to guarantee a pass, that is not a service that exists. The computer test is machine-marked, and the practical is marked by an assessor.

What the documented cases looked like, so you recognise the shape: in Bangladesh in August 2023, Prothom Alo found workers paying Tk 7,500 to 10,000 through agents and computer shops, and agents at one Dhaka centre asking Tk 10,000 to 12,000, when the fee was USD 50. In Nepal, the Kathmandu Post reported in July 2026 that Rs10,000 was being collected against a fee of about Rs7,500, and the government sealed the Kathmandu test centre for lacking legal authorisation.

Two checks cost nothing. Book only on svp-international.qiwa.sa (or the old pacc.sa address, which redirects there) - on 13 October 2026 search results also showed svp-internationalpaccsa.com, with no dot before "pacc", which is not the official site. And verify any certificate you are handed on the portal's public "Check certificate" page.

Paying an agent to fill a form in for you is a choice you are entitled to make. Paying one because you believe the government fee is PKR 60,000 is not a choice - it is a missing figure, and the figure is above.

The portal, the fee and the rules are the same; what changes is the centre network and how many occupations are switched on. From the portal's public data on 13 October 2026:

The activation count is the number to check, not the centre count. An occupation that is activated for India may not be for Bangladesh or Nepal, and the official FAQ is clear that a non-activated occupation does not need the test. Search your own occupation and country on pacc.qiwa.sa rather than trusting a list on any blog, including this one.

Said plainly, because the gap is where people get charged twice:

• Local-currency fees outside Pakistan. USD 85 is the PACC figure for every candidate outside Saudi Arabia, but only Pakistan's NAVTTC publishes a local-currency equivalent. No official Indian rupee, taka or Nepali rupee figure exists; the conversions above are ours, at Wise's mid-market rate.
• Nepal after 30 July 2026. The Kathmandu Post reported that the Saudi embassy suspended visas for SVP-requiring jobs after the Kathmandu centre was sealed. We found no later report saying whether that has been lifted.
• Which centres are active. NAVTTC says 62 centres with 44 active; the portal lists 53. Neither is a live availability list.
• Refunds. No official source we could read states a refund policy for a missed or voided appointment.
• The trade list itself. NAVTTC gives the count - 108 - but we could not find a single published document listing all 108 trades. Other sources variously claim 225 professions, 1,000+ professions and 23 sectors. Those are not reconcilable, and none of them is sourced.
• Which trades require the practical. The rule is per-occupation and the portal decides it at booking; no public list exists.

The SVP is one clearance among several before you fly. The pre-departure medical is the other one that stops visas, and it has its own booking and fail rules - see the Wafid (GAMCA) medical guide. After you land there is a second, in-Kingdom medical before your first iqama, in the iqama medical guide.

For the money once you are there, the iqama cost calculator models the recurring fees, and the Saudi Arabia hub gathers every Saudi guide, portal and service in one place. For in-person errands after arrival, the Saudi service centres directory lists Tasheel and Jawazat offices by city.

Want this handled for you? Wathim does not sell SVP bookings, centres or results - the booking is yours to make on the portal, for USD 85, and nobody can promise a pass. What the desk does run is the paperwork around it: the Saudi work visa, attestation, and the iqama and residency chain once you arrive. Brief the desk and we will take the filing and the follow-ups off your plate.