Veterinary Non-Competes in Texas

Section 15.50(a) sets two gates.

The first is structural: the covenant has to be ancillary to or part of an otherwise enforceable agreement at the time that agreement is made.

The second is about scope: its limits on time, geographical area and the activity restrained have to be reasonable and no greater than necessary to protect the goodwill or other business interest of the promisee — for an associate, the practice.

Read against an offer, that means three separate questions rather than one: how long, how far, and restricting what.

The statute frames each around what the practice is protecting, not around a fixed number of months or miles.

SB 1318 rewrote the definition of "health care practitioner" in § 15.501 to name three license types: dentists, nurses licensed under Occupations Code Chapter 301, and physician assistants licensed under Chapter 204.

Texas licenses veterinarians under Occupations Code Chapter 801, which § 15.501 does not cross-reference anywhere.

A headline about Texas limiting healthcare non-competes therefore does not describe a veterinarian's covenant — the protections stop at the three license types the section names.

Section 15.50(a) itself also points to a separate, pre-existing physician provision in its subsection (b); that provision concerns physicians, and the research behind this page does not quote it.

Section 15.50 contains no wage threshold, so the same reasonableness test applies whatever a veterinarian earns.

For the three practitioner types it covers, § 15.501(b) adds four conditions: a buyout no greater than the practitioner's total annual salary and wages at termination, expiry within one year, a radius of no more than five miles from where the practitioner primarily practiced, and terms stated clearly and conspicuously in writing.

None of those four conditions is written for veterinarians.

A veterinary covenant's duration and radius are measured only against the § 15.50(a) reasonableness language.

SB 1318 took effect on September 1, 2025 and amended both § 15.50 and § 15.501.

Texas's healthcare-specific conditions had covered physicians only, through § 15.50(b) and (d); the amendment extended § 15.501's conditions to dentists, nurses and physician assistants.

The general § 15.50(a) rule that governs a veterinarian's covenant is recorded as unchanged, and veterinarians were not added to the list.

For a veterinarian, the 2025 amendment is mainly a reason to discount headlines, not a change to the test.

The research behind this page reads the statute's text; it does not cover how a Texas court treats a covenant it finds overbroad, whether a covenant tied to selling a practice or an ownership interest is treated differently, or how client and staff non-solicitation clauses are handled.

Those gaps matter most at a buy-in or buy-out, where a covenant may be drafted alongside the purchase terms.

They are left blank here rather than filled from another state's rule — take them to a Texas attorney with the whole agreement in hand.