Veterinary Non-Competes in Wyoming

Section 1-23-108(a) voids, outright, any covenant not to compete that restricts a person's right to receive compensation for skilled or unskilled labor — a broad description that on its face reaches an associate veterinarian's employment covenant.

The same subsection carries four exceptions: a covenant tied to selling a business, one protecting trade secrets, a sliding-scale cap on recovering relocation and training costs, and one for "executive and management personnel and officers and employees who constitute professional staff to executive and management personnel." A veterinarian who is not an owner or manager, reading an ordinary associate agreement, is the person this last exception is written to reach or not reach — and no Wyoming court has yet decided whether a licensed veterinarian counts as "professional staff" under it.

Until that question is resolved, whether a given veterinarian's post-2025 covenant falls under the void rule or is carved out of it is genuinely open on the statute's text alone.

Subsection (b) is a separate, flat ban that applies only "between physicians" and voids a covenant restricting a physician's right "to practice medicine as defined in W.S. 33-26-102(a)(xi)." That cross-reference is to the Wyoming Medical Practice Act, which licenses human medicine.

Veterinarians are licensed under a different title of the Wyoming statutes, so this clause's definition of "physician" does not extend to them.

A Wyoming veterinarian who hears that the state bans physician non-competes should not read that as covering their own contract — that protection is written for medical doctors and doctors of osteopathy, not veterinary medicine.

Wyoming's statute does not condition the void rule, or its exceptions, on how much a veterinarian earns.

It does, separately, allow an employer to recover relocation, education and training expense from a departing worker, but only on a schedule that shrinks with tenure: up to the full expense for someone employed less than two years, no more than 66% for two to less than three years, and no more than 33% for three to less than four years.

That caps what a practice can claw back for training costs, not what pay level a covenant requires, and it applies whether or not the "professional staff" question above is ever resolved.

A covenant that the 2025 void rule reaches has nothing left for a court to modify — it is void, not narrowed.

A covenant governed instead by Wyoming's pre-existing common law — because it predates July 1, 2025, or falls under the "professional staff" exception — is a different question, and the research traces two cases on it.

Hopper v.

All Pet Animal Clinic, Inc. (1993), the state's leading veterinary case, is where the Wyoming Supreme Court first addressed a departing veterinarian's covenant: it found a five-mile radius reasonable but held a three-year duration unreasonable, narrowing the injunction to one year.

Hassler v.

Circle C Resources (2022 WY 28, 505 P.3d 169) later overruled that modification approach — Wyoming courts no longer narrow an overbroad covenant, and one with an unreasonable term now fails entirely.

Neither case answers how a 2025 void-rule covenant would be treated, since neither predates the statute, but for a covenant reached under the pre-existing common law, Hassler's no-modification rule governs the question today, not Hopper's.

Subsection (a)(i) removes "any covenant not to compete contained in a contract for the purchase and sale of a business or the assets of a business" from the void rule entirely.

A veterinarian buying into or selling out of a Wyoming practice is therefore not automatically protected by the same statute that voids an ordinary employment non-compete — a covenant attached to that purchase or sale sits outside subsection (a) from the start.

The research behind this page does not go further into how such a covenant would otherwise be evaluated, so a buy-in or buy-out agreement's specific terms are a separate question from anything else on this page.

Wyoming enacted its general non-compete void rule for the first time in 2025, through SF0107 (Enrolled Act No. 87), signed by the governor on March 19, 2025 and effective July 1, 2025.

The statute is prospective only: it governs covenants entered on or after that date, not agreements already in place.

That makes the date a veterinarian signed their agreement a threshold question in its own right — an agreement from before July 1, 2025 stays under the pre-existing common-law framework the Hopper case illustrates, regardless of how the "professional staff" exception is eventually interpreted, while an agreement signed on or after that date is analyzed under the new statute first.

The research behind this page reads the enrolled 2025 act's text and the statute as codified; it does not resolve whether a licensed veterinarian counts as "professional staff to executive and management personnel" under subsection (a)(iv), and it does not address how Wyoming treats a client or staff non-solicitation clause apart from the void rule and its exceptions.

Both gaps matter directly to an associate weighing an offer with a non-compete clause in it.

They are left blank here rather than guessed at — take them to a Wyoming attorney with the actual agreement and its signing date in hand.