The rest of what we have written about Tennessee. Every figure is quoted from Tennessee’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders and restraining orders in Tennessee
Who can ask for one, what you have to show, what a judge can order, what it costs, and what happens if it is broken — quoted from Tennessee’s own statutes, not summarized.
See a different stateTennessee
Tennessee calls it an order of protection, and it lives in part 6 of chapter 3 of title 36 of the Code. A judge can make an ex parte order the same day, and a hearing follows within fifteen days of the respondent being served. The grounds are wider than domestic abuse alone — stalking, sexual assault and human trafficking each qualify without any domestic relationship. And Tennessee has one provision that changes what a protected person should do when the order is broken, which is set out below.
The short version10 points · tap one to jump to it
- Does this cover me? — Tennessee’s order of protection is not confined to domestic abuse.
- Can I get something today? — Tennessee defines its own threshold in the statute, which removes an argument before it starts.
- The order after a hearing — At the hearing the court either dissolves the ex parte order or, if domestic abuse, stalking, sexual exploitation of a minor, sexual assault or a human trafficking offense is proved on the balance of probabilities, extends it — for a definite period not to exceed one year.
- Firearms — Tennessee sets a deadline and requires a signed document afterwards, which gives you something checkable.
- If they break it — Breaking an order of protection in Tennessee is dealt with in two ways at once, and they are not alternatives.
- Worth knowing about Tennessee — A violation can extend your order to five years, and a second violation to ten.
- Does this cover me? — Tennessee’s list is one of the broader ones in the country, and it takes in relationships several states leave out.
- Penalties in Tennessee — and the section almost everyone cites is the wrong one
- Firearms dispossession, and what the 48 hours actually attaches to — The court must also order and instruct the respondent to complete and return the affidavit of firearm dispossession form, which is published on the Administrative Office of the Courts’ website.
- The part that is the same in every state — This is federal law and it does not change at a state line.
In this subject 10
Does this cover me?
The short version10 points · tap one to jump to it
- Does this cover me? — Tennessee’s order of protection is not confined to domestic abuse.
- Can I get something today? — Tennessee defines its own threshold in the statute, which removes an argument before it starts.
- The order after a hearing — At the hearing the court either dissolves the ex parte order or, if domestic abuse, stalking, sexual exploitation of a minor, sexual assault or a human trafficking offense is proved on the balance of probabilities, extends it — for a definite period not to exceed one year.
- Firearms — Tennessee sets a deadline and requires a signed document afterwards, which gives you something checkable.
- If they break it — Breaking an order of protection in Tennessee is dealt with in two ways at once, and they are not alternatives.
- Worth knowing about Tennessee — A violation can extend your order to five years, and a second violation to ten.
- Does this cover me? — Tennessee’s list is one of the broader ones in the country, and it takes in relationships several states leave out.
- Penalties in Tennessee — and the section almost everyone cites is the wrong one
- Firearms dispossession, and what the 48 hours actually attaches to — The court must also order and instruct the respondent to complete and return the affidavit of firearm dispossession form, which is published on the Administrative Office of the Courts’ website.
- The part that is the same in every state — This is federal law and it does not change at a state line.
In this subject 10
Who can ask for one, and on what grounds
Tennessee’s order of protection is not confined to domestic abuse. Section 36-3-605(b) sets out the grounds a petitioner may prove, and the list is wider than the name of the part suggests: domestic abuse, stalking, sexual exploitation of a minor, sexual assault, or a human trafficking offense.
Stalking, sexual assault and human trafficking do not require any domestic relationship at all. If your situation is one of those, the fact that the other person is not a partner or a relative does not put you outside the statute.
Can I get something today?
Ex parte — and what "good cause" means
Tennessee defines its own threshold in the statute, which removes an argument before it starts.
The second sentence is doing the work. Good cause is not left to be argued about in the abstract — the statute says that immediate and present danger of abuse is good cause. If that is your situation, you are not asking a judge to accept a novel proposition.
Note that the fifteen days run from service on the respondent, not from the date the order was made. If the respondent is hard to find, that clock has not started.
The order after a hearing
One year — and then the part most people never hear about
At the hearing the court either dissolves the ex parte order or, if domestic abuse, stalking, sexual exploitation of a minor, sexual assault or a human trafficking offense is proved on the balance of probabilities, extends it — for a definite period not to exceed one year. Further one-year renewals are available at subsequent hearings.
But Tennessee does something almost no other state does. If the respondent breaks the order, the consequence is not only a prosecution. It is that the order itself gets longer.
One violation, and a one-year order can become a five-year order. A second violation, and it can become a ten-year order.
This changes the calculation about whether to report a breach. In most states reporting a violation starts a criminal process against the other person and does nothing for the life of your own order. In Tennessee it can multiply it by five. If the order is broken, and you can prove it, that is not merely a complaint — it is the route to years of additional protection. Keep the messages, note the dates, and go back to court.
Firearms
What Tennessee’s own law says
Tennessee sets a deadline and requires a signed document afterwards, which gives you something checkable.
The respondent must terminate physical possession of firearms within forty-eight hours, by any lawful means such as transferring them to a third party, and must then complete and return an affidavit of firearms dispossession on a form the statute provides for.
Failure is a Class A misdemeanor, and the statute provides that each violation is a separate offense — which, where there are several firearms, means several offenses.
If they break it
What a violation is, and what it carries
Breaking an order of protection in Tennessee is dealt with in two ways at once, and they are not alternatives.
It can be punished as criminal contempt by the court that made the order, and it can be prosecuted as a separate criminal offense. Beyond both of those, s. 36-3-605(d) allows the extension of the order itself, described above.
So a single violation can produce three consequences: a contempt sanction, a criminal charge, and an order that now runs for five years instead of one.
Worth knowing about Tennessee
The things that are different here
A violation can extend your order to five years, and a second violation to ten. This is the single most valuable thing to know about Tennessee law and almost nobody knows it.
The statute defines good cause for you — immediate and present danger of abuse is good cause.
Stalking, sexual assault and human trafficking are grounds in their own right, with no domestic relationship required.
The fifteen-day clock runs from service, not from the date of the order.
Forty-eight hours to dispossess firearms, plus a signed affidavit, and each firearm not surrendered is a separate offense.
Does this cover me?
Who is a domestic abuse victim
Tennessee’s list is one of the broader ones in the country, and it takes in relationships several states leave out.
Three points worth drawing out. Dating is covered whether or not you ever lived together. Relatives by blood or adoption are covered, and so are people formerly related by marriage — an ex-in-law remains within the statute. And the children of a person in any of those relationships are themselves covered.
What counts as abuse — including money
Financial abuse is named in the statute. Very few states name it. If what is being done to you is control of money — taking your wages, running up debt in your name, cutting off access to accounts — you do not have to translate that into something else before a Tennessee court will hear it.
Malicious damage to personal property is a ground on its own, and so is placing someone in fear of physical restraint, not only of harm.
And there is a provision that matters when the abuse is being carried out at arm’s length:
Abuse committed through someone else is still his abuse. If messages, threats or harassment are coming from his friends, his family or his colleagues on his behalf, that is within the definition — and it is worth saying so explicitly in the petition, because it is the kind of thing people assume does not count.
Penalties in Tennessee — and the section almost everyone cites is the wrong one
The criminal offense of violating a Tennessee order of protection is not in title 36 at all. It is at Tenn. Code § 39-13-113, in the criminal code. Sections 36-3-610 and 36-3-612 carry the contempt route and the arrest mechanics, which are different things.
The criminal offense — § 39-13-113
“(g) A violation of subsection (a) is a Class A misdemeanor. Notwithstanding § 40-35-111(e)(1), a violation of subsection (a) is punishable by a fine of not less than one hundred dollars ($100) nor more than two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), and any sentence of incarceration imposed shall be served consecutively to the sentence for any other offense that is based in whole or in part on the same factual allegations. However, the sentencing judge or magistrate may specifically order the sentences … to be served concurrently.”
A Class A misdemeanor in Tennessee carries up to 11 months and 29 days. But the provision with real bite is the consecutive-sentence default. If he assaults you in breach of the order, the sentence for breaching the order is added to the sentence for the assault rather than absorbed into it, unless the judge specifically orders otherwise. Very few states do this.
Three conditions before the offense exists — subsection (f)
“(1) The person must have received notice of the request for an order of protection; (2) The person must have had an opportunity to appear and be heard in connection with the order …; and (3) The court made specific findings of fact in the order of protection … that the person committed domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking as defined in § 36-3-601 or was convicted of a felony offense.”
Condition (3) is the one to act on. If your Tennessee order does not contain specific findings of fact, the criminal offense does not apply to a breach of it. That is not a technicality; it is a condition written into the statute. Ask the judge to make those findings and to put them in the order. Without them you are left with contempt.
The contempt route — and the mandatory bond nobody mentions
Under § 36-3-610 the court may hold the defendant in civil or criminal contempt, and may assess a civil penalty of $50. Then this:
“(2) The judge upon finding a violation of an order of protection or a court-approved consent order shall require a bond of the respondent until such time as the order of protection expires. Such bond shall not be less than two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) …. Bond shall be set at whatever the court determines is necessary to reasonably assure the safety of the petitioner as required.”
This is a “shall” with a $2,500 floor, it runs for the whole remaining life of the order, and failure to comply is itself punishable as contempt. It is the most useful and least known provision in the Tennessee scheme. If a violation has been found and no bond has been set, that is something to raise.
One more: a person arrested for violating an order is subject to a twelve-hour holding period under § 40-11-150(h).
Firearms dispossession, and what the 48 hours actually attaches to
§ 36-3-625 — 48 hours to dispossess
Where an order fully complies with 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), it must state on its face that the respondent is “required to dispossess the respondent by any lawful means, such as transferring possession to a third party who is not prohibited from possessing firearms, of all firearms the respondent possesses within forty-eight (48) hours of the issuance of the order.”
The court must also order and instruct the respondent to complete and return the affidavit of firearm dispossession form, which is published on the Administrative Office of the Courts’ website.
An honest correction about the affidavit deadline
We had previously flagged the deadline for returning the affidavit as an open question, and having now read the section we can say why we could not find it: there is not one. Subsection (d) says only that “When the respondent is lawfully dispossessed of firearms as required by this section, the respondent shall complete an affidavit of firearms dispossession form … and return it to the court.”
The 48 hours attaches to the dispossession, not to the affidavit. The affidavit obligation is triggered by the fact of dispossession, with no separate numeric deadline. Anyone telling you Tennessee gives 48 hours to file the affidavit is over-reading the text. In practice this means the paperwork can lag, which is worth knowing if you are watching the docket.
Failing to surrender or transfer is a separate Class A misdemeanor under subsection (h), and “each violation shall constitute a separate offense.” Knowingly possessing a firearm while such an order is in effect is a further Class A misdemeanor under § 39-13-113(h), and the respondent “may be charged and convicted under any or all such sections.”
There is a safe harbor in § 36-3-625(f)(1) for weapons whose transfer needs state or federal approval: the respondent may comply “by having the firearm or firearms placed into a safe or similar container that is securely locked and to which the respondent does not have the combination, keys or other means of normal access.”
The part that is the same in every state
An order from one state works in all of them
This is federal law and it does not change at a state line. An order issued by one state, tribe or territory must be enforced by every other as if that state had issued it. And you do not have to register it in the new state first — registration is optional, not a precondition to enforcement.
The same section also says the enforcing state must not tell the restrained person that the order has been registered there unless the protected person asks it to, and must not publish anything online that would be likely to reveal the protected person’s identity or location.
The federal firearms rule needs a hearing first
This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole subject, and it cuts against what most people assume. The federal prohibition at 18 U.S.C. s. 922(g)(8) reaches a person subject to an order only where three things are true: the order was made after a hearing of which they had actual notice and at which they had a chance to take part; it restrains them in relation to an intimate partner or that partner’s child; and it either carries a credible-threat finding or expressly forbids the use of force.
So an emergency or ex parte order does not trigger the federal prohibition on its own — there has been no hearing yet. State law may go further, and many states do, which is why the state rule is set out on this page separately. In United States v. Rahimi (2024) the Supreme Court upheld s. 922(g)(8), holding that “[a]n individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
This rule is narrower than it looks, and the detail matters. Who counts as an “intimate partner” is a defined term that excludes dating partners you never lived with; the two halves of the third condition are not equally settled after Rahimi; and there is a separate federal route based on convictions rather than orders, which does reach dating partners. We set all of it out, quoted from the United States Code, on one page: Guns and protection orders — the federal rule.
How does this state compare? Ten states do nothing at all about firearms on a protection order; fourteen prohibit possession but give the court no way to collect them. All fifty side by side: which states actually take the guns.
You should not be charged for this — in any state
This is settled, and it is worth knowing before you walk into a courthouse. Under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450, a state applying for STOP grant funding must certify to the Attorney General that its "laws, policies, and practices do not require" a victim to bear the costs associated with the filing, issuance, registration, modification, enforcement, dismissal, withdrawal or service of a protection order or a petition for one — nor the costs of filing criminal charges, or of warrants and witness subpoenas. A jurisdiction that does charge has its funds withheld and redistributed to the states that do not.
Every state receives STOP funding and every state has certified compliance. The practical consequence, in the words of the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit, is that victims "should not be required to pay such costs in any state". That covers having the papers served on the other person, which is the charge people are most often asked for.
Two honest qualifications. The provision does not stop a court charging the respondent — many states order costs against them, and that is permitted. And it is a funding condition rather than a direct federal ban, so what a clerk does on a given day can still be wrong. If you are asked to pay a fee for any of the things listed above, you can say that your state has certified under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450 that it does not charge for them. Advocates can also raise it with the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit on 1-800-903-0111, prompt 2.
Where this state’s own statute says so expressly, that is quoted above.
Authority: Tenn. Code Ann. ss. 36-3-601 to 36-3-627, part 6 of chapter 3 of title 36, "Domestic Abuse." Part definitions at s. 36-3-601. Ex parte orders, hearing and extension at s. 36-3-605. Violation procedure at s. 36-3-612. Dispossession of firearms at s. 36-3-625. — Tennessee publishes no free official code on a state website. The General Assembly’s own links page sends “Tennessee Code” straight out to LexisNexis; capitol.tn.gov carries bills and session laws only. LexisNexis is the publisher Tennessee itself designates, so that is what we can offer: read the Tennessee Code on LexisNexis. It is a commercial site, not a Tennessee government one, and we would rather label it than dress it up. Checked 29 Aug 2026.
How we checked this page
Every quotation on this page was read in the source named in the Authority line above, not taken from a summary or another website. On this date we also re-checked every section cited for repeal, renumbering or amendment since 2024 — the sweep that caught North Dakota’s chapter being repealed and replaced, and Nebraska’s moving to an entirely new title.
One thing we could not do, and we would rather say so:
- Tennessee’s official code is not readable by us. It sits behind a JavaScript container operated by its publisher, and the main commercial reproductions were behind bot protection. The text above came from a reproduction whose section structure, figures and act histories we cross-checked against a second source, and all matched — but that reproduction publishes no currency date. Section numbers here are reliable; confirm any figure that matters with the clerk.
What we cannot promise is that nothing has changed since this date. Quote the words with confidence; check a section number before you put it in a filing. And if anything here does not match what a clerk or judge tells you, the court is right and we are wrong — tell us and we will fix it.
We keep a public record of every time we have got the law wrong on these pages, what caused it, and how long it was live: where we were wrong.
If there are children
What Tennessee presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.