The FTC Just Voided 18,000 Pest Control Non-Competes. What Georgia Operators Should Take From It

What the FTC actually did

The Commission's nationwide rule banning most non-competes never took effect — a court stopped its enforcement in 2024 and the agency eventually abandoned the appeal. What replaced it is enforcement one employer at a time, under Section 5 of the FTC Act, and the pest-control industry is where that approach has landed hardest so far.

The consent order announced on April 15, 2026 bars Rollins from using non-compete agreements with most of its employees for ten years, and requires the company to give affirmative notice to current and former workers that their existing non-competes are void. It is not a fine; it is a structural remedy aimed at the agreements themselves.

The clause that drew the attention

The covenants at issue prohibited employees from working in the pest control industry for two years after leaving, anywhere within a 75-mile radius of any of the company's 700-plus locations across the country.

Read that geometry carefully, because it is the part worth learning from. A 75-mile radius is not obviously unreasonable for a route technician. A 75-mile radius around every one of 700 locations is a different animal entirely — stack those circles and the restricted area covers a large share of the country, including places the technician has never been and customers they never met.

The lesson generalises well beyond one company. A radius that sounds modest becomes something else when it is measured from every office you have rather than from the one the employee actually worked out of.

Who the order does not cover

The order excludes directors, officers and other senior leaders — defined as employees exercising significant policy-making authority who are eligible for grants of equity or equity-based interests.

That line is instructive. The distinction the FTC is drawing is not between big companies and small ones; it is between people who genuinely trade a restraint for something of value and people who sign whatever is in the onboarding packet on day one to get a service technician job. A Georgia operator reviewing its own agreements can usefully ask which side of that line each covenant sits on.

The thirteen warning letters

Alongside the order, the FTC sent warning letters to thirteen other pest-control companies employing many thousands more workers, urging them to review their employment agreements for unfair or anticompetitive non-compete provisions.

Warning letters are not findings and they are not penalties. What they are is a statement that the agency regards this industry as a live area, which changes the risk calculation for an operator carrying a broad covenant it has never had reason to test.

What has not changed in Georgia

None of this altered Georgia law. Restrictive covenants here are still governed by the Georgia Restrictive Covenants Act, O.C.G.A. § 13-8-50 and following, which makes a post-employment non-compete enforceable if it is reasonable in time, geographic area and scope of prohibited activities.

The duration question still has a number attached: under O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57, a restraint of two years or less against a former employee is presumed reasonable in time, and one longer than two years is presumed unreasonable, measured from the end of the relationship. Georgia courts may also narrow an overbroad covenant rather than striking it, and since the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in North American Senior Benefits v. Wimmer, an express geographic term is not strictly required — though the covenant must still be reasonable in geographic scope.

So a Georgia pest control operator is not left without options. What the FTC action does is add a second audience. A covenant now has to look reasonable to a Georgia court and defensible to a federal regulator that has decided this industry is worth its time.

A practical review for a Georgia operator

• Measure the territory from where the technician actually worked and had customer contact, not from every location on the map.
• Keep the term at two years or less for ordinary employees, so the Georgia presumption is working in your favour.
• Limit the scope to the work the person actually did rather than the whole industry.
• Separate the clauses. A customer non-solicitation covering accounts the technician actually serviced, and a non-recruitment clause protecting your crew, are narrower, easier to defend, and usually protect what you were actually worried about.
• Protect the route data directly. Customer lists, pricing and service histories are confidential-information questions, and confidentiality provisions are analysed differently from competition restraints.
• Match the restraint to the role. A covenant that makes sense for a branch manager with equity is a harder sell against a first-year technician.

Why this matters more in pest control than in most trades

Two features of the business make these agreements load-bearing. Revenue is recurring and account-based, so a departing technician can take a book of business rather than a single job. And the regulatory and training burden is real, so operators feel — reasonably — that they have invested in someone before that person is productive.

Both of those are legitimate interests, and Georgia law recognises them. The difficulty is that they justify a targeted restraint, not a broad one, and the agreements most likely to be challenged are the ones that reach for the broad version because it was easier to draft.

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