13 institutions in Tennessee hold CCNE accreditation for the Doctor of Nursing Practice. Published in-state graduate tuition among them starts at $8,784 a year, at East Tennessee State University.
Tennessee is a small field.Only 12 schools here carry enough published figures to be scored, so a position says how one compares to its in-state neighbors and nothing about how it compares nationally.
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In-state rates vary enormously here.Published annual in-state graduate tuition among the 11 Tennessee institutions that report one runs from $8,784 to $54,744, a 6-fold spread inside one state and one reporting year.
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Mostly private institutions.7 of the 12 institutions with federal figures are private, so most published rates here do not turn on residency, and private sticker prices are discounted more heavily than public ones.
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Distance study is the exception here.Only 3 of the 12 carry the federal distance-education flag, so studying at a distance from Tennessee usually means enrolling somewhere else.
Metro Guides Inside This State
Narrower than this page and organized around a commute rather than a
border. Each one counts a census metropolitan area, so it can cross a
state line where this page cannot.
Three published figures, weighted. Scores are relative to the
12 institutions on this page and to nothing
else.
50%
Published in-state graduate tuition
Institution-level. Average annual tuition for full-time graduate students, 2023-24, from IPEDS. Not a DNP per-credit rate, not including program differentials, and not net of aid.
35%
Established program
Program-level. DNP conferrals in this CIP and award level in the reporting year, saturating at 25. Above that a program scores full marks and gains nothing further for size.
15%
Institution-wide undergraduate completion
Institution-level and undergraduate. The IPEDS 150%-of-normal-time rate for first-time, full-time bachelor's students.
Nothing is imputed. A program that does not publish a figure is scored on
the ones it does publish, with the remaining weights renormalized; below
2 published figures it is listed
without a position rather than ranked on a single number. Accreditation is
a condition of appearing at all, not a factor that earns points.
What the rubric cannot see.
The Best 12 DNP Programs In Tennessee, Ranked
Ordered on published in-state tuition, annual DNP conferrals and
institution-wide undergraduate completion, weighted for a state
page so cost leads. Scores are relative to the 12 institutions on this page and
not to the country, the same program carries a different
number on the national list. How this is built.
Every ranked institution in Tennessee, with what the federal record
publishes for it and how its score was composed.
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.
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.
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. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures, and the out-of-state rate is about 2.5 times the in-state one, so residency matters a great deal.
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. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
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. School-wide average graduate tuition here, which excludes DNP add-on charges, sits in the lowest third of the 306 accredited institutions that publish a rate, in the 2023-24 federal figures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This program holds current CCNE
accreditation. It files its DNP
conferrals under a specialty classification rather than under
Nursing Practice, so the federal tuition and conferral figures
used above are not available for it and
it is not scored.
Two universities run this doctorate together, and ETSU publishes three different per-credit rates rather than two. Tennessee residents pay $672. Out-of-state students taking every course online pay an eRate of $835.50 instead of the full out-of-state rate of $1,513, which is one of the clearest answers anywhere to whether distance study cuts the price. Credits run 77 to 92 from a bachelor's and 32 to 35 from a master's. Coursework is mostly asynchronous with intensives twice a year, in May and August, currently held over Zoom. One condition to settle first: a clinical placement outside Tennessee depends on approval from that state's regulators and is judged case by case.
Choosing A DNP Program In Tennessee
What studying in Tennessee changes. The questions that apply wherever
you study are on the national ranking page.
Settle your residency before you compare anything else
Across the 5 public institutions in Tennessee publishing both rates, the out-of-state rate runs a median of 1.9 times the in-state one. At The University of Tennessee-Knoxville the gap is $18,188 a year on its own. Residency is decided by the state under its own rules and a distance program does not confer it, so for an out-of-state applicant this one question is worth more than the difference between most of the programs on this page.
With 13 to read, cut on the track before you cut on the school
That is more institutions than anyone reads properly, and the cut that removes most of them is the population focus rather than the ranking. A university with a strong doctorate may not run the specialty you want, and a track can be closed to new applicants while the rest of the program keeps recruiting. Decide the specialty first, then read what is left. The ranking above orders what remains on published tuition, conferrals and completion.
The Tennessee board of nursing decides the license, not the diploma
No doctorate confers authority to practice or prescribe. That authority comes from an advanced practice license the state issues and the national certification behind it, which is why a DNP-prepared and a master's-prepared nurse practitioner on the same license prescribe the same things. What varies between states is the licensure requirement itself, so take it from the board rather than from a program page, and take it early: several programs want an active license in the state where your practicum will happen rather than wherever you hold one now, and licensure by endorsement runs to months. What the degree does and does not grant sets out the distinction.
3 of the 12 measured institutions in Tennessee carry it. That flag records only that taught content can be delivered at a distance. It says nothing about campus days, and nothing about the supervised practice hours, which happen in a building with a preceptor present wherever you enroll. Ask for the number of on-campus days and the months they fall in, because that is what you hold against a roster. Online DNP programs ranks the distance-flagged field nationally.
East Tennessee State University and Tennessee Technological University Joint DNP Program files conferrals under a specialty classification rather than under Nursing Practice, so the federal columns this page ranks on do not exist for it. It carries the same CCNE accreditation as everything in the ranking above. A missing figure here is a filing convention rather than a verdict, and reading it as one would put a real option out of your reach for no reason. The notes beside the name come from the school's own pages.
Nursys, the national
license verification system operated by the boards themselves
AANP places Tennessee in its restricted practice category,
which it defines this way: state law restricts the ability to engage in at least one element of practice, requiring supervision, delegation or team management by another health provider for the nurse practitioner to give patient care.
A degree confers no prescriptive authority. It comes from a state advanced practice license and the national certification behind it, so a DNP-prepared and a master’s-prepared nurse practitioner holding the same license prescribe the same things.
So the thing to settle here is the supervision requirement rather than
the diploma. Ask the board what supervision, delegation or team
management the statute requires, and ask an employer who provides it,
because in a restricted state that arrangement is a condition of working
at all rather than a formality.
Practice environment from AANP's Tennessee fact sheet, read 2026-09-08;
AANP last revised the classification 05/2026. It is AANP's reading of
state statute rather than a federal designation, and statutes move each legislative
session, so confirm it with the board before you rely on it.
Board details read from the NCSBN member directory on 2026-09-08.
Licensure requirements change by legislative session, so treat anything
you read here as a pointer to the board rather than a substitute for it.
What The Work Pays In Tennessee
BLS OEWS, May 2025. BLS classifies by occupation, not by credential: there is no DNP wage series, and every figure here covers everyone in the occupation regardless of which degree they hold.
Nurse practitioners in Tennessee have a median of $117,590, which ranks 50 of the 51 jurisdictions the survey publishes a median for, across about 12,150 people in the state.
That sits in the lower third of the jurisdictions the survey publishes, which is worth setting against local costs before reading it as a verdict.
A median is the midpoint of what people in the occupation are paid, so half
earn less and half earn more; it is not a starting salary and not an offer.
Every row is one federal series, ranked against every jurisdiction that
series covers. Nothing here is a job-board average. DNP salary sets out the
national picture.
Shortage Areas, And The Debt Relief Attached To Them
HRSA designated primary-care Health Professional Shortage Areas, read 2026-09-08.
Designated areas
152
Of those, rural
109
Median score
16
Highest score
23
Most designated shortage in Tennessee is rural, 109 of 152 designations, but the
remaining 43
sit in urban and suburban areas, so eligibility is not only a country
question here. A designation is a statement about how many primary-care providers
serve a defined area relative to its population. It describes supply,
not hiring.
Priority varies between them: a median score of 16
against a highest of 23. Worth asking what a specific
site scores rather than assuming the state figure applies to it.
Both federal loan repayment routes open to advanced practice nurses
require working at an approved site inside a designated area, and the
area’s score sets funding priority when applications outrun the money: Nurse Corps Loan Repayment Program and NHSC Loan Repayment Program. HPSA primary-care scores run 0-25; funding priority for loan repayment follows the score.
Whether a particular employer counts as an approved site is settled by
the program, not by the designation, so check the site before you take
the job rather than after. HRSA's shortage-area data portal
maps the designations. Paying for a DNP
covers the routes that do not depend on where you practice.
Studying From Outside Tennessee
3 of the 13 accredited doctorates in Tennessee carry
the federal distance-education flag, which leaves most of the local field
expecting you in the room and makes an out-of-state program a real
comparison rather than a fallback. Either way it turns on one thing this site cannot answer for you.
Authority to enroll a distance student is set per institution and per
state, and the federal flag this page counts records delivery rather than
permission, so only the school can answer it. Ask two things before
tuition enters the conversation: whether the program can enroll a resident
of Tennessee this cycle, and whether it will place you for supervised clinical
hours near where you live.
What The Figures On This Page Are
Tuition is the institution's published annual graduate rate. It is
not a DNP per-credit price, it is not a total program cost, and
it is not what anyone pays after aid. A DNP taken part-time over
four years does not cost four times the annual figure, because
most programs bill by the credit.
DNP awards are conferrals in the reporting year at that
institution. The figure says a program is running and how much
of it is running; it does not say the program is better than a
smaller one, and the rubric stops rewarding volume above 25
conferrals for that reason.
Undergraduate completion is exactly that, the federal
150%-of-normal-time rate for first-time, full-time bachelor's
students at the institution. It is the weakest input in the model
and carries the smallest weight. No federal series reports DNP
completion, so nothing on this site claims one.
Of the 12 institutions with federal figures here,
5 are at public institutions. In-state tuition at a
public school is available only to residents; the out-of-state
rate is frequently two to four times higher and is the figure an
out-of-state applicant should be reading.
3 institutions here
are flagged by the federal survey as
offered at a distance. That flag records how the coursework is
delivered. It does not mean the clinical hours are remote, and
it does not mean a student never travels to campus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers specific to Tennessee. The degree-wide questions are answered on the guides.
How many DNP programs are there in Tennessee?
13, which is more than anyone reads properly. The cut that removes most of them is the specialty rather than the score: a strong institution may not run the track you want, and a track can be closed to new applicants while the rest of the school keeps recruiting.
How much does a DNP cost in Tennessee?
Published in-state rates run $8,784 to $54,744, a spread of about 6.2 times inside one state. At that width the ranking matters less than knowing which end you are looking at, and the cheap end is usually public and usually conditional on residency.
Is a DNP cheaper in Tennessee if you live there?
Yes, by $18,188 a year at the widest of the 5 public institutions publishing both rates. Enrolling in a distance program does not confer residency; the state sets it under its own rules.
Can a nurse practitioner practice independently in Tennessee?
No. Tennessee is restricted practice in AANP's classification, its most constrained category: statute requires career-long supervision, delegation or team management by another provider. The doctorate changes nothing about that, because authority comes from the license and the statute behind it.
What do nurse practitioners earn in Tennessee?
A median of $117,590, $14,710 below the national $132,300. Worth setting against what the degree costs here before treating the gap as a verdict on the state.
Does federal loan repayment apply in Tennessee?
It can, and here it mostly means rural practice: 109 of the 152 designated primary-care shortage areas are rural. Eligibility follows an approved site rather than a state, so the question belongs to the employer.
Can you study for a DNP online in Tennessee?
3 of the 12 measured institutions carry the flag. It covers taught content and nothing else, so the number to ask each school for is on-campus days and the months they fall in.
Sources
Two datasets produce every figure on this page, and the institutions those figures describe are listed under them. Nothing here is compiled from a school's own marketing material.
1CCNE Accredited Program Directory It decides which institutions appear on this page at all: the 13 in Tennessee below are the ones it lists as holding current accreditation for the Doctor of Nursing Practice.
2IPEDS Published tuition, annual conferrals, institutional completion and the distance-education flag.
Every federal figure on this site is read from the administering agency’s own page, never from a secondary aggregator, and the reading date is recorded beside it.
The Institutions Behind These Figures
Every institution the two datasets name in Tennessee, alphabetically.
A link is the web address that institution reports to the federal
directory, the school’s own site, not a page about the
doctorate.
Where this site has fetched a page on that site and confirmed
it contains the words “Doctor of Nursing Practice”,
that page is linked too and marked as confirmed; that is true of
1 of
13 here.
