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

Hawaii does not ban non-competes for dental practices.

The state's only categorical ban, added in 2015, applies to employees of a 'technology business' — one deriving the majority of its gross income from software or information technology development — and a dental practice would not ordinarily meet that definition.

That does not make your clause safe by default.

Hawaii's antitrust statute makes every contract in restraint of trade illegal unless it fits a lawful exception, and the Hawaii Supreme Court has held that a restrictive covenant is valid only if it is reasonable.

So the practical answer: the fight in Hawaii is over breadth and necessity, not over whether a covenant is allowed at all.

How other states handle this — outright bans, dentist-specific statutes and income thresholds — is covered in our guide to non-competes for dental staff nationally.

Hawaii's rule comes from a statute plus a state Supreme Court decision — you need both.

The statute is HRS § 480-4, Hawaii's antitrust law.

Subsection (a) makes every contract in restraint of trade or commerce in the state illegal.

Subsection (c) then lists covenants the legislature treats as lawful — including, under § 480-4(c)(4), an employee covenant not to use the employer's trade secrets in competition.

The subsection (c) list is not the whole story.

The official annotation to the statute states that those restraints are not the only allowable types — others that are not per se violations of chapter 480 are valid if a court deems them reasonable.

The reasonableness standard comes from the Hawaii Supreme Court in Technicolor, Inc. v. Traeger (1976), which held that a restrictive covenant is not reasonable — and therefore invalid — if it fails the three-part test set out below.

Two freshness points.

As published on the Hawaii Legislature's site (accessed October 6, 2026), § 480-4's history note lists 2015 as its most recent amendment, so no 2023–2025 change to this framework appears there.

And there is no federal rule to fall back on: the Federal Trade Commission's non-compete rule never took effect — a federal court set it aside in 2024 — and the agency removed it from the Code of Federal Regulations on February 12, 2026, so state law governs your covenant.

This research found no Hawaii statute specific to non-competes for dentists, physicians or other healthcare workers — the governing section is the general antitrust statute, and its history note lists 2015 as the most recent amendment.

Because that is a research finding rather than a court holding, confirm the current law with a Hawaii employment attorney before relying on it.

The closest thing to a healthcare thread is commentary, not law: the official annotation to § 480-4 cites a 2011 Hawaii Bar Journal article on physician non-competes, but there is no statute behind it.

What Hawaii does have is a ban aimed at a business type rather than a profession.

Since 2015, HRS § 480-4(d) has barred non-compete and employee non-solicit clauses for employees of a 'technology business' — the software- or IT-development business described above.

A dental practice would not ordinarily meet that definition, so this ban would not ordinarily reach your staff.

Net effect: in the statutes this research reviewed, nothing treats an associate dentist, a hygienist or an assistant differently — for each of them, the general reasonableness framework decides.

The Technicolor test names no years-or-miles formula.

Its three questions are about necessity, hardship and public injury — duration and radius matter because they drive those answers.

One more point from Technicolor: reasonableness, the employee's hardship and the employer's justification are legal questions for the court, not a jury.

Without a formula, choose scope from the interest itself: write down what you need protected — the active patient base the clinician served, referral relationships, staff continuity — and take the shortest term and smallest area that protect it.

Hawaii's statutory ban reaches employee non-solicits as well as non-competes — but only at technology businesses.

For a dental practice, patient and staff non-solicits are not categorically barred; they are restraints like any other, so the same statute and the same reasonableness test decide whether yours holds.

How these clauses are structured, and where other states draw the line, is covered in our guide to patient and staff non-solicits.

Confidentiality sits on firmer statutory ground: HRS § 480-4(c)(4) expressly permits an employee covenant not to use the employer's trade secrets in competition, for a time reasonably necessary to protect the employer and without undue hardship on the employee.

For the patient list specifically, federal law sets the bar.

Under the 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 — but business information, including a list of patients, qualifies only if you took reasonable measures to keep it secret and it has independent economic value from not being generally known.

And a DTSA injunction cannot stop a former employee from taking a new job: conditions on the new employment must rest on evidence of threatened misappropriation, not merely on what the person knows.

Practically, that protection exists only if you build it: individual logins to the practice-management system, no bulk exports of patient data, credentials changed the day someone leaves — and the confidentiality terms in writing at hire.

Because Hawaii's restraint-of-trade statute makes every contract in restraint of trade illegal unless it fits a lawful exception, the leverage sits in the tools narrower than a non-compete and in the drafting itself:

• Put confidentiality first. The statute expressly permits trade-secret covenants, and it is the clause you can keep narrow with certainty — then keep the patient list genuinely secret so it stays protected.
• Layer patient and staff non-solicits rather than widening the non-compete itself, and keep each one scoped to the patients the clinician actually treated.
• Calibrate any non-compete to the goodwill at stake. Under Technicolor, a covenant broader than the protection you need is invalid — shorter and smaller is stronger.
• Write the operational terms into the agreement — a notice period, patient-record custody on departure, schedule handover — so continuity does not depend on winning a covenant dispute.
• Use training repayment where you fund a hygienist's or assistant's training; our guide to training repayment agreements covers how they work and their limits.
• Check the license before you sign the replacement. A covenant protects a practice, not a credential — dentist licensure in Hawaii covers what an associate needs before day one.

Finally, have a Hawaii employment attorney draft or review any covenant before the offer goes out.

And if you are the clinician being asked to sign, our guide to dentist non-compete agreements covers the worker's side of this question nationally.