Compare Tennessee sheriff department costs

Sheriff department cost and staffing across all 95 counties. Click a column header to sort. Hover a column header to see what it measures. Data as of 2026-08-12.

A note on data vintages and definitions. Population is the US Census Bureau's 2018-2022 American Community Survey 5-year estimate, loaded for all 95 counties; the statewide total is 6,923,772. Sheriff staffing is not currently loaded for Tennessee, so the staffing columns show a dash throughout this table. They previously carried the US Census Bureau's Census of Governments Employment 2022 figure, which counts a county government's police protection and corrections employment by function code rather than by agency. That total includes the county probation department, the coroner and the crime lab, and it excludes the sheriff's own court services staff, so it does not describe a sheriff's office. Staffing will return here when a county-published figure is loaded. Tennessee's three consolidated metropolitan governments, Nashville-Davidson, Lynchburg-Moore, and Hartsville-Trousdale, do not report a separate county sheriff function. Tennessee does operate a state inspection agency, the Tennessee Corrections Institute, which under Tenn. Code Ann. § 41-4-140 sets minimum standards for and annually inspects and certifies every county jail, but per-facility rated capacity is not published as a single dataset we have loaded, so the jail column shows a dash for every county. Sheriff department budget data has not been loaded for Tennessee, so the budget column shows a dash for every county. Sheriff names were collected from the Tennessee Sheriffs' Association directory (https://tnsheriffs.com/sheriff-directory/) and, for Fentress County, which is absent from that directory, the county's own sheriff's office site; names were machine-verified against those sources in July 2026. All 95 counties are named. Fentress and Morgan counties had interim officeholders at verification, pending the 2026 elections.