Paralegal Salary in Tennessee 2026,
$58,820 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Tennessee figure is $58,820 a year, or $28.28 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $43,570 at the 10th percentile to $83,100 at the 90th. That is 6.5% below the national median of $62,890 — although Tennessee takes no state income tax from it. The state employs 6,080 paralegals at a location quotient of 0.73.

Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin at $60,800, then Chattanooga $59,290, Memphis $56,850, Clarksville $56,010 and Kingsport-Bristol $54,210. Memphis trailing Nashville by nearly 7% is the internal surprise — Nashville's healthcare, music and corporate legal work supports a deeper and better-paid paralegal market than Memphis's logistics and litigation base.

No. Tennessee neither licenses nor certifies paralegals — there is no state examination, registry or continuing-education requirement, and no protected title. The work is done under a licensed attorney's supervision, and the attorney remains professionally responsible for it. Employers substitute their own standards: a paralegal certificate or degree, and increasingly a national credential such as NALA's CP or an NFPA registered paralegal designation, which are voluntary but widely recognised in the Nashville and Memphis markets.

A great deal, proportionally. Tennessee levies no income tax on earned income and repealed the Hall Tax on investment income in 2021, so the whole $58,820 median is taxed federally only. The nominal figure is 6.5% under the national median of $62,890, but the peer states publishing similar numbers — Kentucky $59,830, West Virginia $59,000 — tax that income, so Tennessee's take-home position is better than its rank on the published wage suggests.

It is stable rather than expanding. The national occupation is projected to grow just 0.2%, Tennessee employs paralegals at 0.73 times the national rate, and the state pro-rates to roughly 610 openings a year — mostly from turnover. The upside is a $83,100 top decile untaxed by the state, reachable through specialisation and e-discovery or document-review management. The risk to weigh is that automation is compressing the routine end of the work faster than the headline number implies.

Because the support structure in Tennessee firms is weighted differently. A location quotient of 0.73 across 6,080 jobs means the state uses dedicated paralegal roles less than the national norm, distributing the work instead across legal secretarial and administrative staff and, in smaller markets, across the attorneys themselves. Nashville's corporate and healthcare practices are the exception and are where the state's better-paid paralegal roles concentrate — which is also why Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin publishes $60,800 against Kingsport-Bristol's $54,210.

SOC 23-2011 is Paralegals and Legal Assistants, and those are not the same job. The bottom of the band — the $43,570 tenth percentile and $47,270 twenty-fifth — is heavily weighted toward legal assistant and document-management work, while the $67,470 seventy-fifth percentile describes substantive paralegal practice with real case responsibility. The median falls between two roles rather than describing one, and the more useful benchmark depends on which of the two an offer actually is.

Practice area and technical scope. Litigation support, corporate transactions, healthcare regulatory work — Nashville's defining industry — and intellectual property all pay above general practice, and that is most of the distance from the $47,270 twenty-fifth percentile to the $67,470 seventy-fifth. Above that, running e-discovery and document review at scale, or managing a firm's paralegal staff, reaches the $83,100 top decile. National credentials such as NALA's CP help at the margin; the practice-area experience does the heavy lifting.