Q: As a New Hampshire employer with Massachusetts employees, can I require all employees to sign the same non-compete agreement?
A: In short, no. A non-compete – an agreement restricting where, or for whom, an employee can work after leaving a job – might seem easiest to standardize, but for employers operating in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the two states’ non-compete laws are different enough that “one size fits all” doesn’t legally hold up.
New Hampshire has the more permissive laws of the two states. With a few exceptions, non-competes are generally enforceable in New Hampshire as long as they’re reasonable in scope and disclosed to the employee before they accept a job offer or before an existing employee accepts a materially different role within the company. However, New Hampshire law prohibits non-competes for low-wage employees (generally those earning at or below 200% of the federal minimum wage regardless of disclosure), physicians, and as of July 2026, physicians assistants.
Massachusetts, however, is far stricter. Under the Massachusetts Noncompetition Agreement Act (the “MNAA”), a non-compete is only enforceable if it’s in writing, signed by both parties, explicitly tells the employee they can consult a lawyer, and is provided either with the job offer or at least ten business days before the employee starts. Further, the non-compete restriction generally cannot exceed 12 months, and the employer generally must either pay at least 50% of the employee’s highest base salary during the restricted period (also known as “garden leave”) or provide other negotiated consideration beneficial to the employee. Massachusetts also bans non-competes for a large number of employees, including hourly (non-exempt) employees, student interns, minors, and anyone terminated without cause or laid off.
The real trap for multi-state employers is choice of law. An employer cannot simply declare that New Hampshire law governs every employee’s agreement to sidestep Massachusetts’s more restrictive rules. The MNAA has specific language that voids choice-of-law provisions that attempt to sidestep its restrictions for any employee who is a Massachusetts resident or has worked in Massachusetts for at least 30 days before their employment ends. In short, where an employee actually lives and works controls, not what the contract or agreement says.
In practice, this means the employer can still ask all employees to sign non-competes, but the employer will need at least two versions: an MNAA-compliant agreement (with garden leave built in) for Massachusetts-connected employees, and a simpler New Hampshire-compliant version for the rest.