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

For agreements signed on or after July 1, 2025, the answer is generally no. Section 1-23-108(a) of the Wyoming Statutes makes any covenant not to compete void if it restricts a person's right to receive compensation for skilled or unskilled labor — which covers an associate dentist, a hygienist and an assistant — unless it fits one of the statute's exceptions.

Contracts signed before July 1, 2025 were not impaired; those are judged under the Wyoming Supreme Court's Hopper factors.

The exceptions are where your protection lives now: sale of a practice, trade secrets, training or relocation repayment, and executive and management personnel.

For the rest of the country, see our guide to non-competes for dental staff nationally.

And if you are the associate holding the contract, that is the worker's side of the question — see our guide to dentist non-compete agreements.

The rule is statutory, and it is new: 2025 Senate File 0107 (Wyoming Enrolled Act No. 87), codified at § 1-23-108 of the Wyoming Statutes, took effect July 1, 2025.

It applies to contracts entered into on or after that date and does not impair contracts entered into before it.

Subsection (a) carries the ban: "Any covenant not to compete that restricts the right of any person to receive compensation for performance of skilled or unskilled labor shall be void," subject to the exceptions listed in the section.

For older contracts, the governing law is the Wyoming Supreme Court's 1993 decision in Hopper, 861 P.2d 531.

The federal layer is quiet.

The FTC's 2024 non-compete 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 — so as of this writing there is no federal rule banning employee non-competes, including for dental practices.

The statute does contain a healthcare subsection, but it belongs to physicians: § 1-23-108(b) voids non-compete provisions of employment, partnership or corporate agreements between physicians that restrict a physician's right to practice medicine.

The text does not mention dentists.

That wording puts dental staff in the general lane: covenants with associate dentists, hygienists and assistants signed on or after July 1, 2025 fall under subsection (a)'s ban, unless an exception — such as the sale of a practice, trade secrets, or the management-personnel carve-out — applies.

The tempting exception is the management one: the statute preserves covenants covering executive and management personnel, officers, and employees who constitute professional staff to them.

Whether an associate dentist or an office manager fits that description is untested — put the question to Wyoming employment counsel before you rely on it.

The license at the center of any associate agreement is its own workstream: see our guide to dentist licensure in Wyoming.

For contracts entered into on or after July 1, 2025, the analysis is the statute's, not Hopper's: the covenant is void unless it fits an exception, so the exception list is the whole inquiry.

Where reasonableness still does the work — contracts signed before July 1, 2025, and covenants sitting inside a statutory exception — the test is Hopper's.

A valid and enforceable covenant not to compete requires a showing that it is: (1) in writing; (2) part of a contract of employment; (3) based on reasonable consideration; (4) reasonable in durational and geographical limitations; and (5) not against public policy.

Hopper also shows what a Wyoming court does with an overreaching term: the covenant there ran three years for a veterinarian, and the court narrowed it to one year and enforced it as narrowed.

It was a professional-practice case, and it is what your pre-July 2025 associate agreements live under.

Draft to what survives that scrutiny: the shortest term that protects the interest you actually have, and an area drawn from where your patients actually come from.

Patient and staff non-solicits are the unsettled piece.

The 2025 act does not define "covenant not to compete," and no Wyoming case law since 2025 was located in this page's research — so whether the statute reaches customer or patient non-solicitation clauses is unresolved.

Treat a patient non-solicit as a question for Wyoming employment counsel, not a template clause.

Building one: see our guide to patient and staff non-solicits.

Confidentiality has firmer footing.

The statute's exceptions preserve covenants to the extent they protect trade secrets, and federal law adds a backstop: the Defend Trade Secrets Act lets the owner of a misappropriated trade secret related to a product or service in interstate commerce sue in federal court.

Under the federal definition, business information — including compilations 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 backstop has a boundary: a DTSA injunction cannot prevent a person from entering into an employment relationship, and conditions on new employment must rest on evidence of threatened misappropriation, not merely on what the person knows.

Inside that boundary, confidentiality protects information; it is not a non-compete by another name.

The statute closes the broadest instrument but leaves a working set:

• Take the non-compete out of new-hire templates — one written into an agreement entered into on or after July 1, 2025 is void.
• Use the repayment the statute explicitly allows. Recovery of relocation, education and training costs works on a sliding scale: up to 100% of the expense for an employee who has served under 2 years, up to 66% at 2 to under 3 years, and up to 33% at 3 to under 4 years. See our guide to training repayment agreements before you draft it.
• Keep the sale-of-practice covenant in your back pocket. Covenants given in the sale of a business or its assets are excepted from the ban — the route when you buy or sell a practice.
• Make the patient list genuinely secret. Trade-secret status depends on the reasonable measures you took — locked-down records access, limited copies, signed confidentiality terms. A list left open on a shared drive is a list anyone can use.
• Inventory agreements signed before July 1, 2025. Those were not impaired and are still judged under Hopper — one may hold up as written, or a court may narrow it. Have Wyoming employment counsel review them.
• Spend the retention budget on the job itself. Schedule control, pay reviews and a real path to ownership do more than a covenant that is void in a new hire's agreement.