Best DNP Programs In Tennessee 2026

• CCNE-accredited
• Public
• Doctorate (research)

Memphis runs one of the most concentrated nursing doctorates in the country. Set doctoral output against the size of the institution and this campus ranks fourth of the 307 accredited institutions on this site, because eighty-four DNP graduates a year come out of a place enrolling barely three thousand people, nearly all of them in health professions. There is no undergraduate arts college here for nursing to sit beside. For a working nurse that usually shows up as faculty who teach at doctoral level as their day job rather than as an overload, and as a cohort big enough that courses run when the catalog says they will. Requirements are published per track rather than for the degree, so the track page is where the credit and practicum totals live.

In-State Tuition

$9,796

Out-Of-State

$22,454

DNP Awards

84

• CCNE-accredited
• Public
• Doctorate (research)

Tennessee’s nurse anesthesia program has been approved by the Council on Accreditation to award the doctorate as the entry credential since June 2019, which matters because the profession moved to doctoral entry and schools converted at different times. The licensing condition rewards a close read too: you need an unencumbered registered nurse license in your state of residence, not simply somewhere. And if you finished a graduate degree within the past two years, one of your rating forms has to come from a faculty member in that program, so references from work alone will not do. Knoxville confers one of the larger numbers of nursing doctorates in the country, so the cohort is substantial rather than a handful.

In-State Tuition

$11,560

Out-Of-State

$30,704

DNP Awards

61

UG Completion

74%

• CCNE-accredited
• Public
• Doctorate (research)

East Tennessee State publishes a semester count for every combination, which is rarer than it should be. Bachelor’s entry runs nine semesters full-time or fifteen part-time. Master’s entry runs four semesters full-time or seven part-time, but only while your doctorate stays in the same concentration as your master’s. Switch concentrations and you get an individualized plan of study instead of a published timeline, which is the school telling you the number will be larger. Coursework is delivered online and asynchronously. The college also guarantees admission to up to ten qualified ROTC students per cohort, which is a real advantage if you are one of them. In-state tuition sits in the lower sixth of the programs on this site.

In-State Tuition

$8,120

Out-Of-State

$11,630

DNP Awards

17

UG Completion

53%

• CCNE-accredited
• Public
• Doctorate (professional)

Chattanooga caps what your past counts for, and says so plainly. The doctorate requires 1,000 clinical hours, and a post-master’s student may apply at most 500 hours earned after the bachelor’s toward that total. So a nurse arriving with a full master’s practicum behind them is still doing 500 more hours here. The post-master’s curriculum runs a minimum of 36 semester credits. Those hours finish in a clinical residency where you complete a translational project supervised by a chair and a committee, which is closer to a thesis structure than to a capstone. In-state tuition sits in the lower fifth of the programs on this site, so for a Tennessee resident the cost side is simple.

In-State Tuition

$8,458

Out-Of-State

$16,522

DNP Awards

12

UG Completion

50%

• CCNE-accredited
• Public
• Doctorate (other)
• Offered online

Tennessee Tech does not run its doctorate alone. It is a joint program with East Tennessee State, which means the faculty pool and the course catalog are larger than a single campus this size could support, and it is the reason a university best known for engineering can offer a nursing doctorate at all. Delivery is blended, mixing online coursework with in-person elements. The school flags a condition that catches distance students out: the regulatory requirements governing student clinical placement vary by state and change over time, so where you may legally do your hours is a question to settle with the program before you enroll. In-state tuition sits in the lower quarter on this site.

In-State Tuition

$9,990

Out-Of-State

$14,190

DNP Awards

10

UG Completion

58%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private nonprofit
• Doctorate (professional)

Baptist Health Sciences runs one cohort a year and it starts in January, for the BSN and the MSN entry points alike. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis but the priority deadline is 1 October, so the real calendar is tighter than rolling admission suggests. Miss the intake and you wait a year. The adult-gerontology acute care concentration is 66 credit hours, and the university puts completion at three years if you want it done that way. The post-MSN pathway is scoped to a specific purpose rather than being a general doctorate: it exists to add a second APRN credential, which is a narrower and more useful thing if you already practice and want a different patient population.

In-State Tuition

$12,216

Out-Of-State

$12,216

DNP Awards

8

UG Completion

40%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private for-profit
• Doctorate (professional)
• Offered online

South College runs two DNPs on very different clocks. The nurse anesthesia concentration is a fixed full-time plan, 36 months across 12 quarters, with no part-time option in the published curriculum. The post-master’s DNP is the opposite: online, and paced by how fast you demonstrate mastery rather than by a semester calendar, with average completion falling between 18 and 30 months and the quickest full-time route at 21. That is a twelve-month spread between two students taking the same degree. So the honest planning question here is not how long the program takes, it is how many hours a week you can genuinely put into it.

In-State Tuition

$16,450

Out-Of-State

$16,450

DNP Awards

6

UG Completion

42%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private nonprofit
• Doctorate (professional)

Belmont’s transfer policy is the reason to look at it. It accepts up to 20 credit hours of prior graduate coursework, where most schools cap transfer at around six, and it publishes worked examples rather than leaving you to ask. An applicant holding a BSN and an MBA can enter the post-master’s track and have that business coursework substitute for health care finance and for leadership and management. If you already hold a graduate degree in something adjacent, that is the difference between starting from scratch and starting a third of the way in. The clinical requirement then depends on track: family nurse practitioner students complete a minimum of 800 hours across the lifespan, and leadership and innovation students complete 700, mapped to the American Organization for Nursing Leadership competencies.

In-State Tuition

$40,560

Out-Of-State

$40,560

DNP Awards

12

UG Completion

71%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private nonprofit
• Doctorate (professional)
• Offered online

3 DNP tracks at this institution, Critical care, Emergency and trauma, Nursing practice (general). Ranked once, on the largest.

Vanderbilt attaches a recency window to its experience requirement, and that is the detail to check before anything else: at least one year of full-time work, or the part-time equivalent, as a registered nurse in a critical care setting, and it has to fall within the past five years. Critical care from six years ago does not count however much of it you did. It accepts an unencumbered license as either a registered nurse or an APRN, and explicitly extends that to United States territories and protectorates rather than the fifty states alone, which matters if you trained or practice in Puerto Rico or Guam.

In-State Tuition

$65,008

Out-Of-State

$65,008

DNP Awards

55

UG Completion

94%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private nonprofit
• Doctorate (professional)

Lee runs three doctoral tracks, a general one, a family nurse practitioner route and an executive leadership doctorate, all online with full-time and part-time plans. Two things set it apart from the usual online arrangement. The school helps arrange your practicum, leadership and scholarly project placements in your own geographic area rather than leaving you to find them, and finding them is the single most common thing that stalls an online doctorate. There is also a real on-campus component: annual intensive sessions, plus a three-day skills lab for practitioner students held before the first practicum, so you learn advanced assessment in person before using it on a patient. Admission wants a 3.0 cumulative average, and you may apply while still eligible for licensure rather than already licensed.

In-State Tuition

$23,040

Out-Of-State

$23,040

DNP Awards

4

UG Completion

63%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private nonprofit
• Doctorate (professional)

King sets a higher bar for the shorter route, which is the opposite of what most people expect. Master’s entry wants a grade point average of 3.25 across your bachelor’s and master’s. Bachelor’s entry wants 3.0. So if your master’s grades were middling, the longer route may be the one actually open to you. The program runs online at 36 semester hours over six semesters, and you may take it slower if you need to. The clinical requirement is 1,000 documented post-baccalaureate hours, with documented doing real work in that sentence. Both entries want a nursing degree from an accredited program, the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education among the bodies named. King is small, so the cohorts are small.

In-State Tuition

$18,423

Out-Of-State

$18,423

DNP Awards

3

UG Completion

48%

• CCNE-accredited
• Private nonprofit
• Doctorate (research)

Union runs three doctoral tracks that lead to genuinely different work: executive leadership, nurse anesthesia, and nurse practitioner practice. It is a Christian university and states that the program integrates faith with professional preparation, which is worth knowing about the cohort you would join rather than reading as a marketing line. Beside the doctorate sit post-graduate certificates in nursing administration, family practice and psychiatric mental health, so a nurse who already holds a master’s can add a specialty without committing to the whole degree. The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education accredits the bachelor’s, the master’s, the doctorate and the certificate programs here, so the full ladder is covered rather than only the top of it.

In-State Tuition

$36,005

Out-Of-State

$36,005

DNP Awards

6

UG Completion

66%