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

Louisiana starts from void, not from reasonableness.

Under section 23:921(A)(1) of the Louisiana Revised Statutes, every provision restraining anyone from exercising a lawful profession, trade or business is null and void, except as that section provides.

So the question that decides your associate's covenant is not whether it seems fair but whether it fits a statutory exception exactly — and the Louisiana Supreme Court requires these agreements to be strictly construed against the party seeking enforcement.

A clause that misses a requirement is a real enforcement risk — and how Louisiana courts treat one that overreaches was not covered in the sources this page is built on.

The exception a dental practice relies on is subsection (C): an employee may agree not to compete with the employer and/or not to solicit the employer's customers, but only within parishes or municipalities the agreement names or parts of them, for no more than two years from termination of employment, and only so long as the employer carries on a like business there.

Nothing in it separates an associate dentist from a hygienist or an assistant — the same rule covers all three.

Where Louisiana sits among the other approaches — outright bans, dentist-specific statutes, income thresholds — is covered in our guide to non-competes for dental staff nationally.

Louisiana's rule is statutory, backed by a controlling Louisiana Supreme Court decision — you need both.

The statute is section 23:921 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes.

Subsection (A)(1) is the default rule above; subsection (C) is the employee exception it allows.

Subsection (B) is the seller's exception that applies when a practice changes hands, subsection (H) is the enforcement provision, and subsection (A)(2) voids choice-of-forum and choice-of-law clauses in Louisiana employment contracts unless the employee expressly, knowingly and voluntarily agreed to them and ratified them after the incident at issue.

The decision is SWAT 24 Shreveport Bossier, Inc. v. Bond, decided by the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2001: because such covenants are in derogation of the common right, they must be strictly construed against the party seeking their enforcement.

There is no federal overlay either way: 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 Louisiana law governs your covenant.

Louisiana's 2024 non-compete rules are physician-specific — and they are not about dentists.

Acts 2024, No. 273, effective January 1, 2025, added subsections (M) and (N) to section 23:921, and both are framed around physicians practising medicine.

A non-compete restraining a primary care physician may not exceed three years from the effective date of the initial contract, and later contracts with that employer may not include non-compete provisions.

For any other physician, the cap is five years from the effective date of the initial contract.

Neither subsection mentions dentists, dental hygienists or dental assistants, so a dental covenant gets no help from those caps: dental staff stay under the general rule in subsection (C) — two years from termination of employment.

These sources cover section 23:921 itself rather than every Louisiana statute, so confirm anything beyond it with Louisiana employment counsel.

What Louisiana does give dentists directly is the sale-of-practice exception: under section 23:921(B), a person who sells the goodwill of a business — a dentist selling a practice — may agree with the buyer not to carry on a similar business or solicit the business's customers within specified parishes or municipalities, for no more than two years from the date of sale, while the buyer carries on a like business there.

That is the provision that protects goodwill when a practice changes hands.

When you are hiring rather than restricting, the credential comes first — dentist licensure in Louisiana covers what an associate needs before day one.

Louisiana does not leave time and area to a judge's sense of reasonableness after the fact.

The statute fixes them, and strict construction polices the fit.

Three requirements decide an employee covenant.

One limit that is easy to miss: subsection (C) reaches independent contractors too — a contractor under a written contract can agree on the same basis as an employee, but the two years run from the date of the last work performed under the contract, not from a termination date.

On the legitimate-business-interest question: the sources this page is built on contain no separate Louisiana test for whether your interest justifies the restraint.

What they show is a statute that builds the protected interest into the limits themselves — a subsection (C) covenant protects a like business and customer relationships only inside the parishes you name, for no more than two years.

Staying inside those lines buys something fixed in return: under subsection (H), proof of breach obliges a court to order injunctive relief enforcing the agreement, without the necessity of proving irreparable injury.

Subsection (C) does double duty: a customer non-solicit sits in the same statutory box as the non-compete, on the same parish list and the same two-year cap.

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

The question that matters for a dental practice is whether your patients count as the 'customers' whose solicitation subsection (C) lets you restrain.

That was not settled in the sources this page is built on, so treat a patient non-solicit as a clause for a Louisiana employment attorney to draft rather than a template clause.

Subsection (C) describes two restraints — a non-compete and a customer non-solicit; a confidentiality clause is neither.

For the patient list itself, the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act is the backstop.

Business information — including a list of patients — 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, and the owner of a misappropriated trade secret related to a product or service in interstate commerce can bring a civil action in federal court.

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

So build the protection operationally — individual logins to the practice-management system, no bulk exports, credentials changed the day someone leaves, confidentiality terms in writing at hire.

Drafting inside the statute is most of the work.

The rest is layering tools that do not depend on winning a covenant fight:

• Name the parishes and municipalities yourself. List where the practice carries on a like business; an agreement that never names its area does not fit the exception.
• Cap the term at two years — from termination for an employee, from the last work performed for a written-contract contractor. Two years is the statute's ceiling; how a court treats a longer term was not covered in the sources this page is built on.
• Pair the non-compete with a customer non-solicit on the same parish list and the same two-year cap; the statute allows both in one agreement.
• Keep other states' law out of the contract: choice-of-forum and choice-of-law clauses are null and void in Louisiana employment contracts unless the employee ratifies them after the incident at issue.
• Use the seller's covenant when a practice changes hands — subsection (B), for up to two years from the date of sale within named parishes or municipalities.
• Consider a training repayment agreement for the skills you fund. It is a different lever with its own limits — our guide to training repayment agreements covers how they work.

Have a Louisiana employment attorney draft or review any covenant before the offer goes out.

And if you want the other side of the table, our guide to dentist non-compete agreements covers the worker's view nationally.