Veterinary Non-Competes in Oklahoma

Section 217 voids any contract that restrains a former employee from working in a lawful trade or business, except as later sections of the same chapter allow.

Section 219A(A) is the exception that reaches an ordinary employment non-compete: a departing employee may work for or open a competing practice, on one condition — they may not directly solicit the sale of goods, services, or a combination of both from the established customers of the former employer.

Subsection (B) backs that permission with a void clause, making any contract provision that conflicts with (A) unenforceable.

For an associate reading an offer, that means the ordinary industry-wide restriction — the clause barring them from working nearby at all — does not survive in Oklahoma, but a narrower restriction on reaching out to the practice's existing clients does.

Oklahoma has no healthcare-practitioner-specific non-compete statute at all — the research lists it among the states where the general chapter, §§ 217-219B, applies to every worker alike, veterinarians included, with no separate carve-out to qualify for or be excluded from.

A veterinarian who sees a headline about a state banning "healthcare worker" non-competes should not go looking for an Oklahoma-specific version of it: the protection they have, and its limits, come from that general chapter — § 219A(A)'s customer non-solicitation rule and § 219B's separate personnel non-solicitation exemption alike — described above.

Section 219A contains no dollar figure, wage threshold, or worker classification anywhere in its text — its only distinction is between an industry-wide restriction, which is void, and a restriction on soliciting established customers, which is permitted.

It likewise states no duration cap and no geographic radius for either half of that split.

An Oklahoma veterinarian's offer letter cannot be measured against a statutory number here, because § 219A does not use one — though a sale-of-goodwill or partnership-dissolution covenant under §§ 218 and 219 is capped by geography, described below.

Oklahoma courts can modify an overbroad covenant, but not without limit.

Bayly, Martin & Fay v.

Pickard held that because § 217 voids only an unreasonable restraint, a court may narrow a covenant's activity, time, or geographic scope to a reasonable one — and that judicial modification has long been the norm specifically for a § 218 sale-of-goodwill covenant, since § 218 invalidates only the excess beyond its statutory limits rather than the whole agreement.

But a court cannot modify a covenant if doing so requires supplying an essential term the parties never wrote.

Applying that limit, Howard v.

Nitro-Lift Technologies confronted a covenant that already barred soliciting past and present customers and suppliers and reached industry-wide employment, far beyond § 219A(A)'s established-customer scope.

The court refused to excise those overbroad terms or supply the statute's own missing definition, and voided the entire covenant instead of narrowing it.

Section 218 lets someone who sells a business's goodwill agree with the buyer not to compete, within a specified county and any county or counties contiguous to it, or a specified city or town, for as long as the buyer keeps the business running there.

Section 219 gives partners the same carve-out when they dissolve a partnership.

Both sections narrow an agreement that reaches beyond that geography down to the permitted territory rather than voiding it outright — the opposite of § 219A(B)'s flat void rule for an ordinary employment non-compete.

A veterinarian buying into or selling out of an Oklahoma practice should expect a goodwill or partnership-dissolution covenant to be evaluated under §§ 218 and 219, not under § 219A's employee framework.

Section 219A(A) is a conditional grant: a departing employee may compete only as long as they do not directly solicit the sale of goods, services, or a combination of both from the former employer's established customers.

Section 219B, added in 2013, is a separate exemption — it takes an employee or independent contractor's promise not to solicit their former employer's other employees or contractors (personnel non-solicitation) out of §§ 217 through 219A entirely, rather than judging that promise against the chapter's void rule at all.

In veterinary practice, where clients often follow an individual practitioner, § 219A(A)'s customer non-solicitation is where an employer's remaining leverage over departing clients sits; § 219B is a distinct tool for restricting a veterinarian from soliciting the practice's other staff.

Sections 217, 218, and 219 all originate at R.L.

1910, §§ 978-980, and each was amended by Laws 1989, SB 257, c.

359.

Section 217 was amended again by Laws 2001, SB 662, c.

406, § 3, with an emergency effective date of June 4, 2001, and § 219A, the employee customer-non-solicitation exception, was newly enacted as § 4 of that same 2001 act — §§ 218 and 219 were not touched by the 2001 act at all.

Section 219B, the personnel non-solicitation exemption, was newly enacted later by Laws 2013, SB 1031, c.

194, § 1, effective November 1, 2013 — the chapter's most recent change.

The research behind this page re-read all five sections directly against Midpage Legal Research's Oklahoma Statutes collection on 2026-09-22 and found no amendment since 2013, but confirm the current text before relying on it, since a legislature can amend a statute at any time.

The research behind this page reads §§ 217 through 219B directly; it does not cover how a court draws the line on what counts as "directly soliciting" or who qualifies as an "established customer" beyond what Howard v.

Nitro-Lift Technologies already decided, nor how a specific goodwill valuation or partnership buyout agreement should be drafted to fit §§ 218 and 219's geography cap.

Those gaps matter most exactly where Oklahoma's exceptions get tested in practice: a relief veterinarian moving between clinics, or a partner buying into or out of a practice.

Take the actual agreement, and any specific dispute over it, to an Oklahoma attorney who handles veterinary employment or transaction contracts.