On July 1, 2025, the Contracts Honoring Opportunity Investment Confidentiality and Economic Growth (CHOICE) Act went into effect, triggering a massive upheaval in Florida’s non-compete laws.
A non-compete agreement is a clause in an employment contract that bars employees or independent contractors from competing with their former employer in a given field for a maximum of four years. For example, if I was an architect and I had signed a noncompete agreement, I would be unable to go work for a rival architecture firm until a set amount of time after I had left my original employer.
A similar contractual provision is a garden leave agreement, where employees, after quitting or getting fired, are given mandatory paid leave. This prevents said employees from immediately going to go work for a competing company. For example, if I, an architect, had signed a garden leave agreement, I would be barred from being hired by that rival architecture firm, because I’m still technically an employee of their competitor.
Florida was already a state that was very welcoming for employers seeking to enforce non-compete and other restrictive covenants against their employees and the CHOICE Act now makes it even easier for employers to stop employees from potentially violating garden leave and non-compete agreements. It also heightens the burden of proof on the employee or subsequent employer, now requiring confirmation that (a) the old and new employers are not direct competitors or (b) that the first employer broke the agreement before the employee did.
Upon application by an employer, a Florida court is now required to issue a preliminary injunction preventing ex-employees from working for any company other than their former employer during the non-compete period. The injunction can only be modified or dissolved if the ex-employees prove that it is not justified.
The CHOICE Act applies to any employees or independent contractors who earn a salary greater than twice the annual mean wage of the Florida county of the employer’s principal place of business. If that principal place of business is outside of Florida, then the salary must be greater than twice the annual mean wage of the country where the employee resides. So, for example, I, an architect, might live and work remotely in the state of North Dakota, where non-compete agreements are banned. But because my employer’s principal place of business is in Florida, I am currently covered by the CHOICE Act, even though I don’t live in Florida.
The CHOICE Act does not apply to healthcare practitioners such as physicians, nurses, dentists, etc.