Are Non-Competes Enforceable in Washington State?

Non-competes are enforceable in Washington state only when they clear every requirement in RCW 49.62, and most don’t. For 2026, the agreement is automatically void if you earned $126,858.83 or less as an employee, or $317,147.09 or less as an independent contractor, at the time you signed. Above those income lines, the covenant still has to satisfy strict rules on timing, written disclosure, duration, and scope. If it fails any one of them, a court can void the agreement and order the employer to pay you the greater of your actual damages or $5,000, plus your attorney fees and costs.¹

Start With What You Earned

Income is the first filter, and it decides most cases before anything else is examined. The Department of Labor and Industries adjusts the thresholds each year for inflation. For 2026:

Employees: the covenant is void unless your annualized W-2 Box 1 earnings exceeded $126,858.83.²
Independent contractors: void unless your annualized 1099 earnings from the party trying to enforce exceeded $317,147.09.²

What matters is your pay at the time the covenant was signed or became enforceable. If you were below the threshold then, the agreement is void even if you later crossed the line. Some employers write in language saying the covenant “may become enforceable in the future” if your compensation rises above the threshold, and the statute does contemplate that.³

Is It Actually a Non-Compete?

Washington defines a “noncompetition covenant” broadly. It covers any agreement restricting you from working in a lawful profession, trade, or business. It also reaches agreements that stop you from accepting work or doing business with a customer of your former employer, even one you never solicited.

A few restrictions are carved out and don’t have to meet the non-compete rules:

A non-solicitation agreement limited to your former employer’s current customers. If it reaches former or prospective customers, it stops being a non-solicit and becomes a non-compete subject to every requirement in the statute.
Confidentiality clauses and restrictions on trade secrets or inventions.
Non-competes signed as part of buying or selling a business, but only if the signer holds at least a one percent ownership interest.
Covenants tied to a franchise sale that complies with Washington’s franchise investment protection law.

The label the employer uses doesn’t control. A court looks at what the agreement actually restricts. A “non-solicitation” clause that functions as a non-compete is treated as one.⁴

When and How It Was Presented

Even a well-drafted non-compete can be void because of how it was handed to you.

New Hires

If you had not yet started work, the employer must have disclosed the complete terms in writing no later than the moment you accepted the offer, whether the acceptance was oral or written. A non-compete produced on your first day, buried in an onboarding stack, is too late and void.³

Existing Employees

If you already worked there when you were asked to sign, the employer had to give you independent consideration. That means something of genuine new value you weren’t already entitled to: a meaningful raise, a promotion, a signing bonus, new equity. Continued employment doesn’t count. Company-wide policy rollouts that hand every employee a new non-compete with nothing attached are a common failure point.³

How Long and How Wide

The 18-Month Ceiling

A non-compete lasting more than 18 months after separation is presumed unreasonable and unenforceable. An employer can try to rebut that presumption, but only by clear and convincing evidence that a longer restriction is necessary to protect the business or goodwill. That’s a high bar, and in practice 18 months functions as a ceiling.³

Reasonable Scope

The restriction also has to be reasonable in what it prohibits and where. Courts ask whether the restraint is no broader than necessary to protect a legitimate interest such as trade secrets, proprietary customer relationships, or specialized training the employer paid for. General skills and experience you brought with you, or picked up doing ordinary work, are not a legitimate basis for locking you out of your field.

Laid Off? The Employer Pays to Enforce

If you were terminated as part of a layoff, the non-compete is enforceable only if the employer keeps paying your base salary for the entire restriction period, offset by anything you earn from new work during that time. Most employers won’t write 18 months of checks to enforce a covenant, so laid-off workers are usually released.³

Choice-of-Law Clauses Cannot Route Around Washington

Some agreements say disputes must be decided under another state’s law, or filed in another state’s courts. For a Washington-based employee or independent contractor, that language is void. Any provision requiring adjudication outside Washington, applying another state’s substantive law, or otherwise depriving you of the protections in RCW 49.62 has no force.⁵

What About Agreements Signed Before 2020?

Washington’s statute took effect January 1, 2020, and it applies to all proceedings brought on or after that date regardless of when the covenant was signed. A 2017 non-compete an employer tries to enforce today must satisfy every current requirement, including the 2026 earnings thresholds and the 18-month duration limit.⁶

One limit: a pre-2020 agreement that is just sitting in a drawer doesn’t create a cause of action. The protections activate when the employer tries to use the agreement against you.¹

What You Can Recover

If a court or arbitrator finds the non-compete violates any part of the statute, the employer owes you the greater of your actual damages or a flat $5,000, plus reasonable attorney fees, expenses, and costs. The same penalty applies even when the judge rewrites the covenant to make it reasonable rather than throwing it out entirely. In most states, that kind of judicial “blue penciling” is a win for the employer because the restriction survives in narrower form. In Washington, reformation carries the same financial consequences as invalidation, which pushes employers to draft carefully from the start.¹

The attorney-fee shift is what makes challenging a bad non-compete realistic. Without it, most workers would just comply with an unenforceable restriction rather than pay a lawyer to fight it, which is what some employers count on.

A Note on Side Jobs and the Withdrawn Federal Rule

Two related points, because they cause confusion. First, Washington separately protects your right to hold a second job. An employer cannot prohibit you from moonlighting, freelancing, or being self-employed if you earn less than twice the state average annual wage, regardless of what your employment agreement says.⁷ That is a distinct rule from the non-compete statute, but it lives in the same chapter and often comes up in the same conversation.

Second, the Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 nationwide non-compete ban never took effect. Federal courts blocked it, the FTC withdrew its appeals in September 2025, and the rule was formally removed from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026. The agency now challenges specific agreements case by case. For Washington workers, none of this changes the answer, because state law already provides the protections the federal rule would have added.

1
Washington State Legislature. Washington Code RCW 49.62.080 – Violation of This Chapter, Relief, Remedies
2
Washington State Department of Labor & Industries. Non-Compete Agreements
3
Washington State Legislature. Washington Code RCW 49.62.020 – When Void and Unenforceable
4
Washington State Legislature. Washington Code RCW 49.62 – Noncompetition Covenants
5
Washington State Legislature. Washington Code RCW 49.62.050 – Provisions of Covenant Void and Unenforceable
6
Washington State Legislature. Washington Code RCW 49.62.100 – Application
7
Washington State Legislature. Washington Code RCW 49.62.070 – Employees Having an Additional Job, When Authorized