In this paper we extend the results of Lenci and Rey-Bellet on the large deviation upper bound of the distribution measures of local Hamiltonians with respect to a Gibbs state, in the setting of translation-invariant finite-range interactions. We show that a certain factorization property of the reference state is sufficient for a large deviation upper bound to hold and that this factorization property is satisfied by Gibbs states of the above kind as well as finitely correlated states. As an application of the methods the Chernoff bound for correlated states with factorization property is studied. In the specific case of the distributions of the ergodic averages of a one-site observable with respect to an ergodic finitely correlated state the spectral theory of positive maps is applied to prove the full large deviation principle.