Bats are recognized as important reservoirs of viruses deadly to other mammals, including humans. These infections are typically nonpathogenic in bats raising questions about innate immune differences that might exist between bats and other mammals. Tetherin is an important restriction factor which inhibits the release of a diverse range of viruses from host cells, including retroviruses, coronaviruses, filoviruses, and paramyxoviruses, some of which are deadly to humans and transmitted by bats. Here we characterise the tetherin genes from 27 species of bats, revealing that they are under strong selective pressure, and that fruit bats and vesper bats express unique structural variants of the tetherin protein. The expression of two computationally predicted splice isoforms of fruit bat tetherin is verified here, and we identify an additional third unique splice isoform which includes a C-terminal region that is not homologous to known mammalian tetherin variants. We also report that vesper bats possess and express at least five tetherin genes, including structural variants, a greater number than any other mammal reported to date.These findings support the hypothesis of differential antiviral gene evolution in bats relative to other mammals.