Veterinary Non-Competes in Louisiana

Section 23:921(A)(1) starts from a default: any contract restraining a lawful profession, trade or business is null and void, except as the section itself provides.

Subsection (C) is the exception that governs an ordinary veterinary employee's covenant — it lets an employee agree to refrain from a competing business, or from soliciting the employer's customers, for up to two years from termination, but only within a parish or parishes, or municipality or municipalities, that the agreement specifies.

Read against an offer, that means the covenant has to clear two conditions to be enforceable at all: a stated geographic scope and a cap of two years.

Subsections (M) and (N), added effective January 1, 2025, cap any contract provision that "restrains a physician from practicing medicine" at three years from the initial contract's effective date for a primary care physician, and five years for any other physician; a subsequent contract executed with that same physician after that initial term cannot include a noncompete at all.

A separate, narrower rule applies only if the physician ends the contract before that initial term: the employer may then restrain the physician for up to two years, limited to the physician's home parish plus no more than two contiguous parishes, which the contract must specify.

Subsection (O) exempts physicians employed by rural hospitals or federally qualified health centers from (M) and (N) entirely, sending them back to the general (C) rule instead.

Nothing in (M), (N) or (O) mentions veterinary medicine or a veterinary license, and the operative phrase restrains practicing medicine specifically — a veterinarian's covenant is not addressed by these subsections and stays under § 23:921(C).

Section 23:921(C) has two sentences.

The first is the provision an associate veterinarian's employment agreement is measured against: it permits the employee to agree to refrain from carrying on a similar business, or soliciting the employer's customers, within a specified parish or parishes, for as long as the employer keeps operating there, up to two years from termination.

Its opening clause expressly reaches "the individual shareholders" of a corporate employer too, so an equity-holding veterinarian who is also employed by the practice can fall under it — or, depending on the agreement, under (J), (K) or (L) instead.

The second sentence covers an independent contractor working under a written contract — the arrangement a relief veterinarian typically works under — capped at two years from the last work performed, not from a later termination date.

There is no dollar threshold in any of these — the limits run on geography and time, not on what the veterinarian earns.

Subsection (B) is written for the seller of a business's goodwill, not an employee: a person who sells the goodwill of a business may agree with the buyer to refrain from competing with it or soliciting its customers, within a specified parish or parishes, for up to two years from the date of sale, and only for as long as the buyer keeps operating a like business there.

That is the provision for an outright sale of a practice.

A veterinarian who instead holds equity and leaves or is bought out falls under a different subsection: (J) for a shareholder, (K) for a partner, or (L) for an LLC member ceasing to hold that status — each capped at two years from that exit, within a specified parish or parishes.

A dissolving partnership has its own two-year rule at (E), from the date of dissolution.

This page does not analyze (E), (J), (K) or (L) in detail; which one applies depends on how the practice is organized and how the exit happens.

Acts 2024, No. 273 added subsections (M), (N) and (O) to § 23:921, effective January 1, 2025, giving physician non-competes their own three-year and five-year caps and a rural-hospital/FQHC exemption.

The statute's own note frames this act as adding those three subsections; it does not describe the 2025 act as touching (C).

The section's full recorded history of amending acts runs from 1962 through this 2024 act, but that list does not say which subsection any earlier act amended, so this page cannot say when § 23:921(C) itself was last changed.

For a veterinarian, the 2025 change is a reason to double-check whether a headline about Louisiana's new physician caps applies to a specific contract — it does not change the two-year, parish-specified rule that governs a veterinary employee's covenant.

The sources read for this page are the statute's own text; they do not include a Louisiana court decision on what happens to a covenant that omits the required parish or exceeds the two-year cap — whether a court would strike just the offending detail or treat the whole covenant as failing the (C) exception is not answered here.

They also do not settle whether the word 'physician' in (M) through (O) could ever be read to reach a veterinarian beyond the plain 'practicing medicine' language the statute uses.

Both are questions for a Louisiana attorney reading the actual contract, not something this page fills in from another state's rule.