Here's a piece of Minnesota law that could change your life and that almost nobody I talk to knows about. If you signed an employment agreement promising not to go work for a competitor after you leave — a "non-compete" — and you signed it on or after July 1, 2023, it is, in the words of the statute, "void and unenforceable." Not "unenforceable if unreasonable." Not "enforceable for a year but not two." Void.
What the statute actually says
Minn. Stat. § 181.988 is refreshingly blunt: "Any covenant not to compete contained in a contract or agreement is void and unenforceable." It sweeps in not just W-2 employees but independent contractors too — including the increasingly common trick of making a worker form an LLC as a condition of the gig. And it adds a second protection people miss: an employer can't force a Minnesota worker, as a condition of the job, to litigate their claims in another state or under another state's law. Minnesota keeps its own workers under Minnesota law.
There are only two narrow exceptions, and they're sensible: you can still agree to a reasonable non-compete when you sell your business (the buyer deserves protection from the seller reopening across the street) or when partners dissolve one. Outside those, the non-compete is dead. The statute even lets a court award an employee attorney fees for enforcing these rights.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Non-competes were never really about protecting trade secrets — there are separate laws for that (and § 181.988 pointedly leaves nondisclosure and trade-secret agreements alone). They were about holding workers hostage. Nationally, roughly one in five American workers has been bound by one, including fast-food workers and warehouse staff who have no secrets to steal. Their real function was to make it costly to quit for a better job — which is exactly how wages get suppressed. When people can freely take the next opportunity, pay rises, startups get founded, and skills go where they're valued. Minnesota chose worker mobility over employer lock-in, and it puts us in rare company: only a small handful of states — California and North Dakota among them — ban non-competes this cleanly.
And notice the pattern this series keeps finding. In 2024 the Federal Trade Commission tried to ban non-competes nationwide. A federal court in Texas struck the rule down before it ever took effect. Once again, a federal consumer-or-worker protection died in court — and the Minnesota statute stands on its own, needing no help from Washington. That's the states'-rights argument working for ordinary people.
The honest limits
Two caveats, because I won't oversell it. First, the ban is prospective — it voids non-competes signed on or after July 1, 2023, but doesn't automatically erase one you signed in 2019. Courts still judge those older agreements under the prior "reasonableness" law, so if yours predates the ban, talk to a lawyer rather than assume.
Second, and more important, the statute leaves nondisclosure and non-solicitation agreements untouched. That's mostly right — but aggressive employers have learned to write NDAs and customer-non-solicits so broadly that they function as backdoor non-competes: technically you can work for a competitor, but you can't contact anyone you ever met or use anything you ever learned. That's the next frontier, and it's where the law still needs sharpening.
What we can do
Tell workers the law changed. The single biggest problem with § 181.988 is that employers still hand out non-competes and workers still believe them. A void contract only chills you if you don't know it's void. Plain-language notice — and an Attorney General willing to say so loudly — turns a statute into a real freedom.
Close the backdoor. Set objective limits on non-solicitation and confidentiality clauses so they can't be stretched into the non-compete the law just banned. Protect genuine trade secrets; don't let "confidential" mean "everything."
Defend the ban. Business groups will keep pushing to carve out exceptions — for "highly compensated" employees, for "key" personnel. Those carve-outs are how a clean rule gets riddled with holes. Minnesota drew a bright line; the job now is to keep it bright.
If you're staying in a job you'd leave because a piece of paper says you can't compete, read that paper's date. In Minnesota, it may not be worth anything at all.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Minn. Stat. § 181.988 (2023), verified verbatim against raw text at revisor.mn.gov: subd. 2 ("Any covenant not to compete contained in a contract or agreement is void and unenforceable"), the sale-of-business and dissolution exceptions, the inclusion of independent contractors (subd. 1), the choice-of-law and venue protections (subd. 3), and the attorney-fee provision. The law applies to contracts and agreements entered into on or after July 1, 2023 (2023 Minn. Laws ch. 53). The federal comparison: the FTC's Non-Compete Clause Rule (issued April 2024) and its being set aside by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Ryan LLC v. FTC (August 2024) before its effective date. The "roughly one in five workers" figure reflects widely cited Bureau of Labor Statistics and economic-literature estimates of non-compete prevalence.
The precise share of Minnesota workers historically bound by non-competes, and any Minnesota appellate decisions construing § 181.988, were not pulled this pass and are described in general terms. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.