On 25 June 2026, an amendment to Article 43 of the Labour Law came into force under Law No. 9 of 2026. It is a short provision, part of a wider set of amendments to the Labour Law. It still changes how non-compete clauses work in Qatar, and most employment contracts currently registered with the Ministry of Labour were drafted before it.
The amended article allows an employer to restrict a departing employee from competing with it, or from joining or participating in a competing business, where the employee's role gave them access to the employer's clients or business secrets. The restriction cannot exceed two years. So far, familiar.
Two things are new. The restriction now takes effect only once the competent administration at the Ministry of Labour has approved it. And if the contract is terminated during the probation period, the clause is treated as if it never existed.
The approval requirement is the one to watch
Under the old position, you drafted the clause, the employee signed it, and the question of enforceability was left for a dispute that might never come, argued with limited confidence on either side. Now there is a gate. No approval, no restriction. A well-drafted clause that is never put to the Ministry is decoration.
Nobody has this approval step in their contract registration workflow yet, because until recently it did not exist. That is worth fixing before the next batch of hires, not after the first resignation.
What the law still does not say
The amendment does not define competition. There is no test in the statute for when a business "competes" with another. Is a sales manager who joins a supplier caught? A consultant who serves the same clients from a different industry? The honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and there is no Ministry practice to point to, because the provision is only weeks old. Until approval decisions and court rulings accumulate, the contract has to do the work itself: define the restricted activity by reference to what the employer actually does, not with boilerplate.
What we are telling clients
Not every employee qualifies. The statutory threshold is access to clients or business secrets, and a blanket clause pasted into every contract does not meet it. Keep the duration inside two years. Build the Ministry approval step into the registration process. And because a probation-period exit kills the clause entirely, confidentiality and non-solicitation obligations need to stand on their own in the contract rather than lean on the non-compete.
The last point is the practical one: review what is already registered. Most templates in circulation predate the amendment. Employees, for their part, should know the framework cuts both ways — a restriction wider than the statute allows is not one they are bound by.
If your employment contracts were last reviewed before June 2026, that is the starting point.
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We review and update employment contracts and workplace policies for compliance with the amended Labour Law, and act in termination and end-of-service disputes.
Employment & end-of-service → Contact the firm →This article provides general information about a recent legislative change and does not constitute legal advice on any particular matter.