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

Indiana courts can enforce a dental non-compete, but only the reasonable parts of it.

The Indiana Supreme Court's starting point is that employment non-competes are restraints of trade disfavored by the law, so a clause gets no automatic pass just because both sides signed it.

They get no automatic death sentence either.

Indiana's leading healthcare decision confirmed that a covenant between a physician and a medical practice group is not per se void as against public policy and is enforceable to the extent it is reasonable.

Indiana's corrective tool is the blue pencil: a court may strike an unreasonable portion of your covenant, but it may not rewrite the agreement into a different one it likes better.

Two boundaries frame the rest of this page.

The detailed non-compete rules the Indiana legislature wrote are for physician noncompete agreements, and this research found no equivalent statute for dental teams.

And if you are reading as the associate rather than the owner, our guide to dentist non-compete agreements covers the employee's side.

The federal level is settled: as of October 2026, there is no federal rule banning employee non-competes.

The Federal Trade Commission's Non-Compete Clause Rule was set aside in court and never took effect, and in a final rule published February 12, 2026, the FTC removed it from the Code of Federal Regulations.

How other states treat dental covenants — including the states that void them outright — is covered in our guide to non-competes for dental staff nationally.

On the state side, the law a dental covenant answers to is case law, as far as this review found.

The detailed statute Indiana did write — Indiana Code 25-22.5-5.5 — covers physician noncompete agreements.

The research for this guide found no Indiana statute written for dentist, hygienist or assistant covenants; treat that as what this review did not find rather than proof none exists, and have Indiana employment counsel confirm.

The leading healthcare decision is Central Indiana Podiatry, P.C. v. Krueger, 882 N.E.2d 723 (Indiana Supreme Court, 2008).

The clinician was a podiatrist, and the covenant was with the practice group; the Indiana Supreme Court held that non-competes between a physician and a medical practice group are not per se void as against public policy and are enforceable to the extent they are reasonable.

The opinion speaks of physicians, not dentists — but it is the Indiana Supreme Court applying the framework Indiana courts bring to employment covenants: disfavored restraint, reasonableness review, blue-pencil correction.

Indiana's legislature has regulated this space — for physicians.

Indiana Code 25-22.5-5.5 applies to physician noncompete agreements originally entered into on or after July 1, 2020.

Two of its rules are worth knowing so you do not mistake them for dental ones.

Under IC 25-22.5-5.5-2.5, a primary care physician and an employer may not enter into a non-compete; that ban applies to agreements originally entered into on or after July 1, 2023.

And since July 1, 2023, a physician non-compete is unenforceable when the employer terminates without cause, the physician terminates for cause, or the contract expires with both sides' obligations fulfilled (IC 25-22.5-5.5-2(b)).

None of that reaches your practice.

The chapter is written for physician noncompete agreements, and the research for this guide found no Indiana statute extending comparable rules — protections or limits — to dentists, hygienists or assistants.

That cuts both ways: on the statutes this review found, a departing dental employee in Indiana has no escape hatch to invoke, and your practice has no safe harbor to rely on — no legislature-drawn mileage cap, maximum term or buyout formula.

What you write is what a court grades against the reasonableness standard.

Krueger shows the framework working on healthcare facts.

The Court enforced the covenant only to the extent it was reasonable, and it limited the enforceable geography to where the clinician had built patient relationships with the practice's resources.

Translate that to a dental practice.

The interest Krueger recognized — patient relationships your practice built with its own resources — is the one the case law above puts behind you.

A restriction drafted around it has a defensible core.

A restriction that reaches every community you might someday serve invites the blue pencil — and when the blue pencil comes out, the stakes are asymmetric, because the court can strike what is unreasonable but cannot rewrite the rest into the covenant you should have written.

On the specifics: the sources reviewed for this page give no Indiana cap on years or miles for a dental covenant, and no statutory default to fall back on.

That gap is an argument for having Indiana employment counsel read the actual wording — grading covenant language against what Indiana courts treat as reasonable is counsel's daily business, not a detail to guess at.

A non-solicit is the narrower ask: it restricts who a former employee may target — your patients or your staff — rather than where they may work.

The sources reviewed for this page do not settle how an Indiana court will grade a given patient or staff non-solicit, so treat the drafting and its enforcement as questions for Indiana employment counsel.

For clause language and the states that restrict or allow these clauses, see our guide to patient and staff non-solicits.

Confidentiality protection does not depend on the covenant surviving.

The federal Defend Trade Secrets Act is one route: under 18 U.S.C. § 1839, business information — including a compilation such as a patient list — is a trade secret only if you took reasonable measures to keep it secret and it has independent economic value from not being generally known.

The "reasonable measures" half is the record you build: access-controlled logins, signed confidentiality terms, a patient list nobody exports to a personal address.

The DTSA lets the owner of a misappropriated trade secret related to a product or service in interstate commerce sue in federal court, but an injunction cannot bar a person from entering into an employment relationship, and conditions on the new job must rest on evidence of threatened misappropriation — not merely on what the person knows.

Confidentiality enforcement reaches the information; it is not a veto on working down the street.

Because Indiana courts fix overbreadth by striking rather than rewriting, the drafting is the strategy:

• Draft to the interest Krueger recognized. Tie the restricted area to the patient relationships your practice built with its own resources — not to every community you hope to serve someday.
• Keep the term short enough to defend. This review found no Indiana statute that hands you a default number, and the shorter the restriction, the less there is for a court to strike.
• Stack the protections. A non-compete, patient and staff non-solicits and written confidentiality terms protect different things — keep each narrow enough to survive review.
• Price training separately. If the concern is recovering the cost of training the job did not require, training repayment agreements are a different tool with their own state-law rules — see our guide to training repayment agreements.
• Confirm licensure at hire. A covenant only matters if the person can practice — our guide to dentist licensure in Indiana covers what Indiana requires.
• Have Indiana employment counsel review the final language before it goes into an offer packet, not after a departure forces the question.