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 2026-07-21.

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 comes from the US Census Bureau's 2022 Census of Governments Employment survey (March reference period); headcount equals full-time plus part-time positions across function codes 062 (sworn law enforcement), 162 (civilian law enforcement), and 005 (corrections). The Census publishes no true full-time-equivalent figure, and the March snapshot is not directly comparable to a full annual operating budget. Staffing is loaded for 92 of the 95 counties; Tennessee's three consolidated metropolitan governments, Nashville-Davidson, Lynchburg-Moore, and Hartsville-Trousdale, are not separately reported to a county sheriff function in that dataset, so those three show a dash. 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.