Travel, custody and relocation in Tennessee

The passport rules are federal and read the same everywhere. This page is the other layer — what Tennessee law and Tennessee’s own court forms say about taking your child on a trip, moving, and who holds the passport between journeys.

Read this alongside the federal rules

Getting a child’s passport, consent letters, the Hague Convention and what actually stops a departure are the same in all fifty states — they are on the main travel page. Start there, then come back here for the part that varies.

Custody jurisdictionNot established Which state’s court may decide custody — and why a holiday elsewhere does not move it.

Abduction Prevention ActNoThe court still has its own powers; it just has no uniform-act toolkit to draw on.

Relocation noticeNo notice period Tenn. Code Ann. § 36-6-108 (parental relocation)

Triggered bymore than 50 miles from the other parent, or… more than 50 miles from the other parent, or outside the state (per the Tennessee General Assembly’s own bill summary of present law)

Which court decides — and why a trip does not change it

Tennessee custody jurisdiction sits under its own statute. The practical point for travel is this: a child’s home state is where they lived for six consecutive months before a case started, and a temporary absence counts toward that period. A summer with grandparents in another state does not start a clock there, and it does not let the other parent file somewhere new.

Abduction-prevention powers

Tennessee has not enacted the Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act. we could not verified. Tennessee is the one state in this set with no machine-readable official code. The Tennessee Code Annotated is published for the State by LexisNexis and requires cookies and JavaScript; http://www.tncourts.gov sits behind a JavaScript bot challenge and, once the challenge cookie is computed, still returns 405 ‘Unusual Activity Detected’; publications.tnsosfiles.com returns 403 for the Public Chapter PDFs. Rather than report a citation from memory, both the UCCJEA and UCAPA fields are left null.

Moving, and how much warning you owe

Verified from the Tennessee General Assembly’s own site rather than from the code. The enacted 2018 act (H.B. 1666 / S.B. 1651, 110th General Assembly, effective July 1, 2018) states: “Tennessee Code Annotated, Section 36-6-108, is amended by deleting subsections (c)-(j) in their entireties and substituting instead the following: (c)(1) If the relocating parent seeks to move with the child, the other parent may, within thirty (30) days of receipt of notice, file a petition in opposition to removal of the child. If a petition in opposition is filed, the relocating parent has the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that the relocation is in the best interests of the child according to the factors found in § 36-6-106(a)(1)-(15). (2) No presumption in favor of or against the request to relocate with the child shall arise. The sole issue before the court is whether to permit relocation of the child based upon the best interests of the child.” Subsection (e) adds: “In the event no petition in opposition to a proposed relocation is filed within thirty (30) days of receipt of the notice, the parent proposing to relocate with the child shall be permitted to do so.” Subsection (d) provides that “a relocation of the child of fifty (50) miles or more shall be considered as a matter of law a material change in circumstances” for adjusting child support. The General Assembly’s bill summary describes the present-law notice duty as applying to a parent “wishing to relocate outside the state or more than 50 miles from the other parent within the state.” The ADVANCE-NOTICE PERIOD in § 36-6-108(a) was not amended by this act and we could not read from a primary source, so notice_days is left null rather than guessed.

Relocation and vacation are different questions, and orders often treat them in the same paragraph. A trip is temporary; a move changes the child’s residence. Read your own order for which one your plan actually is before you assume the relocation rule does not apply.

What the standard order says about travel

Tennessee has no single statewide parenting order. Travel terms come from your own order and from local court rules, which vary by county or district. Read your order rather than a template.

Not verified. Tennessee requires a permanent parenting plan on a form developed by the Administrative Office of the Courts, but the AOC form is hosted on http://www.tncourts.gov, which blocked automated access, so its vacation, notice, itinerary, out-of-country travel and passport terms we could not read from a primary source.

Who holds the passport

Nothing in Tennessee’s statutes or standard forms addresses who holds the child’s passport. That is not a gap you have to live with — it is a clause you can ask for, and the federal rules above are the reason to.

What catches people out in Tennessee

Tennessee’s relocation law changed fundamentally on July 1, 2018. The old scheme, which turned on whether the parents were spending ‘substantially equal intervals of time’ with the child and which put the burden on the objecting parent, was repealed. Post-2018 the sole issue is the child’s best interest and the relocating parent carries a clear-and-convincing burden. Any source describing the ‘substantially equal time’ test is describing repealed law.

The 30 days in § 36-6-108(c)(1) is the objecting parent’s window to file a petition in opposition, counted from receipt of notice – it is not the notice period. Do not conflate the two.

50 miles appears in § 36-6-108(d) as an automatic material change in circumstances for CHILD SUPPORT purposes. Whether the same 50 miles is the notice trigger comes from subsection (a), which is not verified here.

There is no free, machine-readable official Tennessee Code. Anything you read about Tennessee custody law on a secondary site is unverifiable against the official text without a Lexis session.

Sources for this page

Relocation rule: https://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/110/Bill/HB1666.pdf

Sources we could not reach when this page was built, recorded so you know what is missing rather than assuming it was checked: https://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/tncode/ – the State’s official code publisher; requires cookies and JavaScript; https://www.tncourts.gov/ – JavaScript bot challenge; after solving the challenge and returning the cookie the site returns HTTP 405 ‘Unusual Activity Detected’; https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/acts/ – HTTP 403 (CloudFront request blocked) for Public Chapter PDFs; https://www.uniformlaws.org – renders enactment data only via JavaScript; no JS renderer available in this environment

Every fact above is taken from the source linked beside it. Where a figure could not be confirmed from an official source, this page says so rather than printing a plausible number. Found an error? Tell us — it goes on the corrections page with the date.

Every state

Sources last checked30 August 2026

Page published30 August 2026

What this means. This is when the sources on this page were last read against their originals — statutes, court rules, official schedules — taken from the date this page was built from its sources. It is not the date the page was last edited. Adding a link or fixing a typo does not move it; re-reading the statute does. Law changes without notice, so treat anything time-sensitive as needing a fresh check. Where we get something wrong we publish it at thecusp.app/corrections with the date, what changed, and how long the error was live.