A fast preconditioned penalty method is developed for a system of parabolic linear complementarity problems (LCPs) involving tempered fractional order partial derivatives governing the price of American options whose underlying asset follows a geometry Lévy process with multi-state regime switching. By means of the penalty method, the system of LCPs is approximated with a penalty term by a system of nonlinear tempered fractional partial differential equations (TFPDEs) coupled by a finite-state Markov chain. The system of nonlinear TFPDEs is discretized with the shifted Grünwald approximation by an upwind finite difference scheme which is shown to be unconditionally stable. Semi-smooth Newton’s method is utilized to solve the finite difference scheme as an outer iterative method in which the Jacobi matrix is found to possess Toeplitz-plus-diagonal structure. Consequently, the resulting linear system can be fast solved by the Krylov subspace method as an inner iterative method via fast Fourier transform (FFT). Furthermore, a novel preconditioner is proposed to speed up the convergence rate of the inner Krylov subspace iteration with theoretical analysis. With the above-mentioned preconditioning technique via FFT, under some mild conditions, the operation cost in each Newton’s step can be expected to be O(Nlog N) , where N is the size of the coefficient matrix. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed fast preconditioned penalty method.