Last mentioned: Mar 25, 2026
Notification Deadline
Final date for employers to notify staff in writing that noncompetes are void.
Effective Date
All noncompetition covenants become void and unenforceable statewide.
SHB 1155 Signed
Governor Bob Ferguson signs the near-total ban on noncompete agreements.
Initial Restrictions
Washington limits noncompetes to high-earning employees and contractors.
Governor Bob Ferguson has signed SHB 1155, effectively banning nearly all noncompete agreements for employees and independent contractors in Washington starting June 2027. This retroactive legislation marks a significant pivot for the Pacific Northwest’s tech ecosystem, prioritizing labor mobility over traditional corporate restrictive covenants.
This page surfaces every story mentioning SHB 1155 across our startup coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running startup beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where SHB 1155 was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |