Five Takeaways From the FTC’s Decision to Abandon the Noncompete Rule
On Friday, September 5, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC or the Commission) brought its multiyear effort to ban employee noncompete agreements to a conclusion . As readers of this blog will certainly remember, in April 2024 , the FTC voted to adopt a regulation (the Noncompete Rule or the Rule) that would have banned the great majority of employee noncompete agreements across the country. The Noncompete Rule was immediately challenged in court and, in August 2024, a federal court in Texas held the Noncompete Rule unlawful and issued a broad order vacating the Rule in its entirety. The FTC appealed that decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals but, given the subsequent change in presidential administrations, it was long anticipated that the Trump-Vance FTC was likely to abandon its efforts to defend the Biden-era Noncompete Rule. On September 5, these expectations came to fruition, as the FTC finally and definitively announced its ...
