Are Non-Competes Enforceable for Dentists and Dental Staff in Georgia?

Georgia's Restrictive Covenants Act (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-50 et seq.) is the frame for the restrictive covenants your associate dentists, hygienists, assistants and front-office staff sign.

Four results matter in practice:

• Only certain employees can be bound. A post-employment non-compete is allowed only against employees who customarily solicit customers, regularly make sales, manage the business (directing two or more employees with hire/fire authority), or perform the duties of a key employee or a professional (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-53(a)).
• Two years is the yardstick. Georgia courts presume a post-employment restraint of two years or less reasonable in time, and one of more than two years unreasonable (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57(b)).
• Anyone can sign a patient non-solicit. Under O.C.G.A. § 13-8-53(b), any employee may agree in writing not to solicit — directly or by assisting others — business from patients, including prospective patients the employee actively sought, provided they had material contact with them, for a stated period after termination.
• An overbroad covenant is not always dead. A covenant that misses the Act is void, but a court may modify it, as long as the modification does not make it more restrictive for the employee (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-53(d)).

There is no federal rule to fall back on either: the Federal Trade Commission's non-compete rule never took effect — a federal court set it aside — and the Commission removed it from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026.

For how the picture changes outside Georgia, see our guide to non-competes for dental staff nationally.

Two of the Act's categories are defined terms, and they are the ones that matter most for clinical staff:

• A "professional" is an employee whose primary duty requires advanced knowledge customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction — and the definition expressly excludes technician work learned through on-the-job and classroom training (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-51).
• A "key employee" is an employee with selective or specialized skills, customer contacts or customer information obtained by working for the employer, or high influence with the employer's customers (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-51).

On timing: the Act is widely reported to apply to contracts entered into on or after May 11, 2011, but we could not confirm that date from the session law — for an older agreement, or any dispute over which law governs, have a Georgia employment attorney check.

One Georgia Supreme Court decision dealt with a dental covenant directly, and it predates the Act.

In Cobb Family Dentistry v. Reich, 259 Ga. 450 (1989), an associate dentist's original covenant barred her for two years from practicing dentistry within seven miles of any practice office where she had worked.

The Georgia Supreme Court reversed a ruling against the practice and held the renegotiated covenant not too vague or broad: for two years the dentist could practice nearby and treat any patient, but could not solicit the practice's patients or advertise targeted at two ZIP codes.

It is pre-Act law — an example of how Georgia courts weighed a dental covenant, not current statutory analysis.

Start with the caveat: our research for this page found no Georgia statute written specifically for non-competes for dentists or other healthcare workers — and because the statutes were not exhaustively searched, treat that as a research finding, not settled law.

What our sources show is the general Act, which governs dentists, hygienists and assistants alike — no profession-specific rule appears in what we reviewed.

So the practical question for each role is which statutory category it fits.

The "professional" test turns on the primary duty requiring advanced knowledge from prolonged specialized instruction — and deliberately excludes technician-level work picked up on the job and in the classroom.

None of the sources we reviewed settles whether an associate dentist, dental hygienist or assistant counts as a "professional" — treat it as a role-by-role question for counsel.

The "key employee" category maps onto what a practice values: selective or specialized skills, patient contacts or patient information obtained by working for you, or high influence with your patients.

In a dental practice, the patients are the customers that definition protects.

Time.

For an employee covenant, Georgia courts presume a restraint of two years or less reasonable and anything longer unreasonable, measured from the date the business relationship ends (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57(b)).

For a covenant against the owner or seller of all or a material part of a business or professional practice, the presumption stretches to the longer of five years or the period during which sale payments are being made (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57(d)) — the rule that matters when you buy a practice or sell an associate a material stake in it.

Area and scope.

Our sources for this page include no Georgia rule fixing how wide a covenant's territory or activity restriction may be.

Cobb Family Dentistry is the only dental example we have, and it shows calibration, not a formula: the seven-mile, two-year covenant above was renegotiated into a patient non-solicit plus a bar on advertising targeted at two ZIP codes, while the dentist kept treating patients nearby — pre-Act illustration, not a template the current Act endorses.

When a covenant misses.

A covenant that misses the Act is void, but a Georgia court may modify it as long as the modification does not render it more restrictive for the employee than as originally drafted (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-53(d)) — any modification must leave the covenant no more restrictive for the employee than originally drafted.

The sources for this page do not carry the Act's other drafting requirements, so put the covenant in front of a Georgia employment attorney before you rely on it.

The patient non-solicit is the one tool every member of your team can sign.

Under O.C.G.A. § 13-8-53(b), any employee may agree in writing to refrain, for a stated period after termination, from soliciting — directly or by assisting others — any business from the practice's customers, including prospective customers the employee actively sought, provided they had material contact with them.

For you, "customers" means patients, and "material contact" is the statute's limit on which customers a clause can cover — where it stops for a given hygienist, assistant or associate, the individual's own patients or your whole recall list, is a question to settle with counsel when you draft.

The two-year presumption speaks to post-employment restraints generally (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57(b)).

The Act frames the § 13-8-53(a) restrictions on post-employment competition as distinct from the customer non-solicitation provision in subsection (b) and from nondisclosure-of-confidential-information provisions — separate restraints, treated separately: that distinction is why any employee can sign the non-solicit while the non-compete is limited to the § 13-8-53(a) categories.

Confidentiality terms do the complementary work.

Under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, the owner of a misappropriated trade secret related to a product or service in interstate commerce can sue in federal court, and business information — a patient list included — qualifies only if you took reasonable measures to keep it secret and it has independent economic value from not being generally known.

But a DTSA injunction cannot bar someone from taking a new job, and conditions on the new employment must rest on evidence of threatened misappropriation, not merely on what the person knows.

For how these clauses are structured, see our guide to patient and staff non-solicits.

Georgia's statute rewards covenants built to fit it, not copied from another practice:

• Match the covenant to a statutory category before you draft. An office manager directing two or more employees with hire/fire authority, a treatment coordinator who customarily solicits patients, an associate who may qualify as a professional or key employee — each sits differently. For a role that fits none, the § 13-8-53(b) patient non-solicit is the protection any employee can sign.
• Stay inside the two-year presumption for employment covenants, and reserve the longer sale-of-practice presumption for a covenant against an owner or seller of all or a material part of the practice.
• Keep the patient list genuinely secret — limited logins, no exports to personal addresses, confidentiality terms in every agreement — so trade-secret law has something left to protect.
• Protect your training spend separately: where you fund a course or credential for a hygienist or assistant, our guide to training repayment agreements covers how they work and where states restrict them.
• Write the operational terms into the agreement itself — notice periods, patient-record handling on departure, schedule handover — so continuity does not depend on the covenant holding up.

Before signature, confirm the clinician's credential — our guide to dentist licensure in Georgia covers what an associate needs — and have a Georgia employment attorney review the covenant against the current statute.

If you are the clinician side of the negotiation, our guide to dentist non-compete agreements covers the worker's view.