School districts in Tennessee

52% of the 631 populated ZIP Code areas in Tennessee are served by more than one school district — 331 of them, which puts the state 23rd among the fifty-two. It is organized into 125 unified districts, 16 elementary districts and 15 secondary districts, the largest being Metropolitan Nashville Public at 327,984 homes. Its most divided ZIP Code area, 38006, is split between 7 districts for elementary grades alone. In 28 of them the answer for grade school is not the answer for high school. The two districts that share the most ZIP Codes here are Giles County and Lawrence County, in 6 of them.

How often a ZIP Code here crosses a district line

Tennessee keeps 15 separate secondary districts — districts that pick students up partway through and run to the end of high school, over several elementary districts at once. Where one of those sits, an address has two district names and neither is wrong.

ZIP Code areas with a district631
Served by more than one district331 (52%)
Grade school and high school differ28 (4.4%)
No high school district named1
Unified districts125
Elementary districts16
Secondary districts15
Homes in no district at all3

The largest districts in Tennessee

Ranked by the homes inside their boundaries: Metropolitan Nashville Public leads at 327,984, then Shelby County and Knox County. Only districts with a page here are linked; 151 more exist in the state without one.

The most divided ZIP Code area in Tennessee

ZIP Code area 38006 holds 2,193 homes and 7 districts take a real share of them for the early grades, but Bells City holds 70% on its own at that level. This is the shape that makes a single-name lookup look right: it names Bells City and describes most of the homes here, and silently not the rest.

Grade schoolBells City School District70%1,537 of 2,193 homes

High schoolCrockett County School District in Bells70%1,537 of 2,193 homes

Each percentage here is a share of the 2,193 homes counted in ZIP Code 38006, not the chance that any one address is in that district. Enrollment follows the street: two houses on opposite sides of the same road can be in different districts, and only the district office can say which.

Every track below is 35 cells long and stands for all 2,193 homes counted in ZIP Code 38006, so one cell is 63 homes, rounded to the nearest whole cell. Cells lit solid are the homes one district holds, and the unlit cells are the homes held by the other districts in the same list.

Bells City School District1,537 of 2,193 homes70%
Haywood County School District364 of 2,193 homes17%
Crockett County School District112 of 2,193 homes5.1%
Alamo City School District90 of 2,193 homes4.1%
Jackson-Madison County School System90 of 2,193 homes4.1%

For grade school, an answer of one district name would be wrong for 656 of the 2,193 here.

How much of Tennessee a single district name misses

Across the 631 ZIP Code areas in Tennessee with homes in them, an answer of one district name misses 326,669 of the 3,029,741 homes they hold — 11% of the state. In 277 of those areas the single name is the whole truth; in the other 354 it is not.

In ZIP Code 37064 · Franklin, Tennessee the largest district for grade school is Williamson County School District, and naming it alone misses 11,687 of the 24,672 homes counted there. The rest are with Williamson County School District in Franklin and Franklin Special.

ZIP Code 38002 · Lakeland, Tennessee is the case Tennessee is known for: 5,024 of its 15,419 homes have no high school district named in the federal file, and Lakeland School System leads what is named for grade school. An answer of one name misses 10,395 homes there and the arrangement behind them.

In ZIP Code 37129 · Murfreesboro, Tennessee the largest district for grade school is Murfreesboro City, and naming it alone misses 9,291 of the 23,914 homes counted there. The rest are with Rutherford County School District in Murfreesboro and Rutherford County School District.

Where a ZIP Code here names more than one district

Of the 631 ZIP Code areas in Tennessee that the federal file names a district for, 331 name more than one school district. These are the 12 with the most, starting at 7 districts in one postal area: Bells, Humboldt and Lakeland. Each row opens the full answer for that ZIP Code, with every district named for grade school and for high school and the share of the homes each one holds.

What to do next

Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: 331 of the 631 ZIP Code areas in Tennessee with a district named for them are served by more than one school district, and the line between two of them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.

This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.

If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.

What this cannot tell you

The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.

A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.

A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.

Where these numbers come from

School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.

The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.

Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.