CYPHR Register · Employment
Does New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania ban non-compete agreements?
No. None of the three bans non-compete agreements. Each asks whether the restriction is reasonable. New York's ban was vetoed in 2023. Pennsylvania bans them for health care practitioners alone.
The short version
Move a signed non-compete across these three state lines and it does not become void anywhere. In all three states the question is the same one: is this restriction reasonable? Only Pennsylvania has written any part of the answer into a statute, and it did so for five job titles.
New York. New York has no statute banning non-compete agreements. One passed both chambers in 2023 and the Governor vetoed it on December 22, 2023. Enforceability is decided by a three-prong common-law test: the restraint must be no greater than required to protect the employer's legitimate interest, must not impose undue hardship on the employee, and must not injure the public.
New Jersey. New Jersey has no statute banning non-compete agreements either. Its Supreme Court asks whether the restraint protects the employer's legitimate interests, imposes no undue hardship on the employee, and is not injurious to the public. New Jersey also does something the other two do not: a covenant that reaches too far is enforced so far as it is reasonable rather than struck down whole.
Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has no general ban. Its Supreme Court enforces a restrictive covenant if it is incident to an employment relationship, is reasonably necessary to protect the employer, and is reasonably limited in duration and geographic extent. Pennsylvania is also the only one of the three with a statutory ban of any kind: Act 74 of 2024 voids non-compete covenants for health care practitioners, subject to an exception.
Side by side
| State | Statutory ban? | What decides enforceability | Statutory exception |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | None. A ban was vetoed on December 22, 2023 | Three-prong reasonableness: no greater than required to protect the employer's legitimate interest; no undue hardship on the employee; no injury to the public | None |
| New Jersey | None | Reasonableness: protects the employer's legitimate interests, imposes no undue hardship, is not injurious to the public. An overbroad covenant is enforced in part | None |
| Pennsylvania | None of general application | Three parts: incident to the employment relationship; reasonably necessary to protect the employer; reasonably limited in duration and geographic extent | Health care practitioners, under Act 74 of 2024 |
Sources for every row are in the table below, each quoted from the authority itself.
The details that catch people out
New York came within one signature of a ban, and has not come that close since
S3100A passed both chambers in 2023. The Governor vetoed it on December 22, 2023, the veto was not overridden, and the bill never became law. Three later bills have been introduced since. On August 30, 2026 the New York State Assembly's own tracking pages showed all three still in committee, including one that had passed the Senate in June 2025 and sat in an Assembly committee from that day. A bill that passed both chambers is not law, and a bill that is pending is not law either.
New Jersey cuts an overbroad covenant down instead of throwing it out
Most real disputes are not about whether a non-compete exists but about whether it reaches too far. New Jersey's Supreme Court replaced the older all-or-nothing rule with partial enforcement, and stated the test for it directly: The better test is whether partial enforcement is possible without injury to the public and without injustice to the parties. In New Jersey an overbroad clause is likely to be narrowed rather than voided, so do not read one as a dead clause.
Pennsylvania's statutory ban covers five job titles, not an industry
Act 74 of 2024 defines a health care practitioner as a closed list: a medical doctor, a doctor of osteopathy, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, a certified registered nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant. Dentists are not on that list. Two further limits matter as much as the list itself. The prohibition reaches covenants entered into after the act's effective date of January 1, 2025, not covenants already running. And the exception in section 4(b) lets an employer enforce a covenant of no more than one year anyway, provided the practitioner was not dismissed by the employer. A Pennsylvania employer can still hold a departing physician to a one-year restriction.
Only one of the three general statements names time and distance
Pennsylvania's test says out loud that the restriction must be reasonably limited in duration and geographic extent. New York's three prongs, as the Court of Appeals states them, do not name either. New Jersey sits in between: alongside its general formulation, its Supreme Court restated the wording New Jersey courts had repeatedly used, which asks whether the prohibition is not unreasonably restrictive in point of time or territory upon the rights of the employee. Where a state's general statement is silent on a point, that silence is not a rule that the point does not matter. It means the general statement is pitched higher, and the answer for your clause sits in the decisions applying it.
Where this comes from
| Authority | Part | What it says, word for word | Source | Checked | State of check |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S3100A, 2023-2024 Reg. Sess. (N.Y. 2023) — vetoed non-compete ban (would have added Lab. L. §191-d) | Bill status line; veto action row | Bill status line, on the Senate’s bill page: Vetoed by Governor Action row, on the Assembly’s tracking page — date cell 12/22/2023, action cell VETOED MEMO.133 |
nysenate.gov · nyassembly.gov | 2026-08-26 | Checked at source |
| BDO Seidman v. Hirshberg, 93 N.Y.2d 382 (1999) (N.Y. Ct. App.) | Three-prong common-law reasonableness test | A restraint is reasonable only if it: (1) is no greater than is required for the protection of the legitimate interest of the employer, (2) does not impose undue hardship on the employee, and (3) is not injurious to the public | law.cornell.edu | 2026-08-26 | Checked at source |
| Solari Industries, Inc. v. Malady, 55 N.J. 571 (1970) (N.J. Sup. Ct.) | Common-law reasonableness test; partial enforcement | It will generally be found to be reasonable where it simply protects the legitimate interests of the employer, imposes no undue hardship on the employee, and is not injurious to the public. | case.law | 2026-08-26 | Checked at source |
| Hess v. Gebhard & Co., 570 Pa. 148, 808 A.2d 912 (2002) (Pa. Sup. Ct.) | The general three-part test | In Pennsylvania, restrictive covenants are enforceable if they are incident to an employment relationship between the parties; the restrictions imposed by the covenant are reasonably necessary for the protection of the employer; and the restrictions imposed are reasonably limited in duration and geographic extent. | case.law | 2026-08-26 | Checked at source |
| Fair Contracting for Health Care Practitioners Act, Act of Jul. 17, 2024, P.L. 846, No. 74 (Pa.) — the health care carve-out only; it does not reach the general law | Section 4(a)-(b) | (a) Applicability.--Except as provided under subsection (b), a noncompete covenant entered into after the effective date of this subsection is deemed contrary to the public policy and is void and unenforceable by an employer. (b) Exception.--An employer may enforce a noncompete covenant if the length of the noncompete covenant is no more than one year, provided that the health care practitioner was not dismissed by the employer. | legis.state.pa.us | 2026-08-26 | Checked at source |
We fetched each source on the date shown and quoted the operative words directly. The New York bill row reads two official pages, each labelled, because no single page carries both. The two court decisions link to the Caselaw Access Project record of the official reporter, which is served as data rather than as a web page. Three of the five sources — the New York bill record and the two court decisions — were fetched again on August 30, 2026 and matched what is quoted here.
What we have not verified
- We read the general rule each state applies. We did not read the decisions applying those rules to particular facts, and we did not read the regulations or agency guidance underneath them.
- We did not check whether any of the three states restricts non-compete agreements for particular occupations, or below a wage threshold, apart from the one Pennsylvania statute quoted above.
- Pennsylvania's Act 74 of 2024 has sections we have not set out here. We quote its applicability rule and its exception. We do not describe the rest of the act.
- We did not check city or county rules in any of the three states.
- We did not check federal law or federal agency rulemaking on non-compete agreements, and this entry makes no statement about either.
- Our New York reasonableness text comes from the Court of Appeals opinion as published by Cornell's Legal Information Institute, which prints it as uncorrected and subject to revision before publication in the official reports.
- We give one citation for each decision. For the New York and New Jersey decisions we did not confirm the parallel citations in the other reporters, so we have left them out rather than print numbers we cannot show you.
- We checked these sources on August 26, 2026 and re-checked three of them on August 30, 2026. We have not checked whether any of them changed after those dates.
- This is a description of what these authorities say. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for your own counsel on your own facts.
Related
The other entries on hiring across these three states are whether they use the ABC test for worker classification and what job postings must disclose under New York and New Jersey pay-transparency laws. This entry is part of the CYPHR Register — questions answered from the law itself, each one dated and sourced. Why we publish the sources at all is set out on the evidence page. The corpus behind these answers is CYPHR Intelligence.