Employment Law

Garden Leave UK — Can Your Employer Force You to Stay Home? (2025 Guide)

26 May 2025 ⏱ 9 min read 🇬🇧 England & Wales Last reviewed: May 2025

Garden leave — being paid to stay away from work during your notice period — is increasingly common in professional, financial, and senior roles. It protects employers from losing clients and confidential information to a competitor, but it also restricts your freedom to start a new job. This guide explains when garden leave is lawful, what rights you keep while on it, how it interacts with post-employment restrictions, and when you can challenge it.

What Is Garden Leave?

Garden leave (sometimes written as "gardening leave") occurs when an employer instructs an employee to stay away from the workplace during their notice period, while continuing to pay their full salary and maintaining all contractual benefits. The name is a wry reference to the idea that the employee has nothing to do but tend their garden — they remain employed, fully paid, but effectively excluded from work.

Garden leave is most commonly used when a senior employee or key individual resigns to join a competitor. The employer wants to prevent that person from taking clients, confidential information, or strategic knowledge with them in the weeks before they leave. By placing them on garden leave, the employer prevents access to sensitive information, allows relationships with clients to cool, and buys time to arrange a transition.

Garden leave is also used as a form of paid suspension in some disciplinary contexts, though formal suspension during an investigation is a distinct concept. This guide focuses on garden leave in the notice period context.

Is Garden Leave Always Lawful?

The lawfulness of garden leave depends on whether your contract contains an explicit garden leave clause. Without such a clause, imposing garden leave on a reluctant employee is legally precarious for the employer — though courts have developed a body of law that sometimes permits it even without explicit contractual authority.

With a Garden Leave Clause

Most senior employment contracts now contain an express garden leave clause, typically worded along the lines of: "During the notice period the Company may, in its absolute discretion, require you not to attend any premises of the Company or any client and/or not to undertake all or any of your duties." If your contract contains such a clause, the employer has a clear contractual right to place you on garden leave, provided they continue to pay your full salary and maintain all contractual benefits.

Without a Garden Leave Clause

Without an express clause, the employer may still be able to impose garden leave in certain circumstances — but it is more complex. Some senior employees have an implied right to work: in roles where performance is essential to maintaining skills or reputation (such as a barrister, surgeon, or salesperson whose earnings depend on doing the job), preventing work may itself breach the contract. However, for most office-based roles, courts have found that the implied duty to provide work is weaker, and that paying full salary is the employer's primary obligation. An employer who pays in full but excludes the employee from the workplace may be acting within their rights even without an express clause — but this is contested and fact-specific.

Calculate your garden leave entitlements and notice period pay with our Garden Leave Calculator.

What You're Entitled to During Garden Leave

While on garden leave, your contract of employment remains in force. This means you retain all the following:

Full salary — paid at your normal rate for the duration of the notice period. Any attempt to reduce pay during garden leave is a breach of contract unless you have agreed to it.
All contractual benefits — company car, health insurance, life assurance, pension contributions, and any other benefits in your contract must continue. The employer cannot strip benefits as a form of pressure during garden leave.
Holiday accrual — you continue to accrue paid annual leave during garden leave. You may also be required to take holiday during garden leave if the employer gives proper notice.
Pension contributions — employer pension contributions continue throughout the notice period, including garden leave.
Share scheme participation — depending on the scheme rules, garden leave may or may not affect vesting or exercise of share options. Check your scheme rules carefully, as "good leaver" and "bad leaver" definitions can have significant financial consequences.

Duty of good faith continues: Although you are not working, you remain an employee during garden leave. Your duty of fidelity and confidentiality continue. You cannot work for a competitor, solicit clients, or disclose confidential information during garden leave any more than you could while actively working.

Can You Work for a New Employer During Garden Leave?

No — unless your current employer expressly consents. Working for a competitor, or doing anything that competes with your employer, during garden leave is a breach of your employment contract. It could also expose you to an injunction from your employer and claims for damages. Even if your new employer wants you to start immediately, they cannot legally require you to breach your existing contract to do so.

If you want to start your new job earlier than the end of your garden leave period, you need to negotiate with your current employer. Options include:

Requesting a waiver of the remaining garden leave period
Negotiating a payment in lieu of the remaining notice period
Agreeing a shorter garden leave in exchange for giving something in return — for example, agreeing to additional post-employment restrictions

Garden Leave and Restrictive Covenants

Garden leave and post-employment restrictive covenants (non-compete clauses, non-solicitation clauses) serve similar protective purposes but operate differently. Most professional contracts contain both. The key interaction is:

Time Served on Garden Leave May Reduce the Restriction Period

Courts have held that time spent on garden leave can count towards the running of a post-employment restriction. If your contract contains a six-month non-compete clause and you spend four months on garden leave, the effective restriction after your employment ends may only be two months — though this depends on the exact wording of both clauses and the facts. Some contracts expressly provide that the restriction period runs from the date employment ends, not from when garden leave begins, in which case garden leave does not reduce the restriction period.

Enforceability of Restrictive Covenants

Post-employment restrictions are only enforceable if they protect a legitimate business interest and go no further than reasonably necessary to protect that interest. Courts scrutinise them strictly — an overly broad non-compete (for example, preventing you from working in any competing role anywhere in the world for two years) will be struck down as an unlawful restraint of trade. A six-month non-solicitation of named clients in a defined geographical area is more likely to be enforceable. Whether your specific restrictions are enforceable depends on your seniority, the nature of your role, and the reasonableness of the restriction. Seek legal advice before assuming a restriction is enforceable — or unenforceable.

Check whether your non-compete clause is likely to be enforceable with our Non-Compete Clause Checker.

Can You Challenge Garden Leave?

In limited circumstances, yes. You may be able to challenge garden leave if:

Your contract does not contain a garden leave clause and you have a genuine right to work (rare — most applicable to performers, barristers, and sales roles where work is essential to earnings or skill maintenance)
The employer is using garden leave in bad faith — for example, to prevent you from exercising share options that would otherwise vest during the notice period
The employer is in breach of contract in other respects — for example, by stripping benefits or reducing pay during garden leave

If the employer is in repudiatory breach (a serious breach of contract) and you accept that breach, your garden leave obligations may end — but accepting a repudiatory breach is a drastic step that requires careful legal advice.

Payment in Lieu of Notice (PILON) vs Garden Leave

Payment in lieu of notice (PILON) is different from garden leave. PILON terminates employment immediately — you receive a lump sum instead of working or serving your notice, and your employment ends on the day of PILON. Garden leave, by contrast, keeps you employed through the full notice period but away from the workplace.

The distinction matters for several reasons:

Benefits — during garden leave, all benefits continue. On PILON, the employer pays the monetary equivalent but benefits typically end immediately.
Post-employment restrictions — PILON ends the employment (and starts the clock on restrictions) immediately. Garden leave extends employment, so restrictions start running later.
Tax — since April 2018, PILON is always taxable as income, whether or not the contract contains a PILON clause. Garden leave pay is taxed as normal employment income throughout.

Step-by-Step: What to Do If You Are Placed on Garden Leave

Review your contract — find the garden leave clause, notice period, and any post-employment restrictions. Note exactly what rights and obligations apply during the notice period.
Confirm everything in writing — ask your employer to confirm in writing the length of the garden leave, what benefits continue, and whether you are expected to take holiday during the period.
Check your share scheme position — if you have unvested shares or options, check when they vest, whether garden leave counts as "active employment" for vesting purposes, and whether you are treated as a good leaver or bad leaver.
Negotiate early release if needed — if you want to start a new job sooner, open a negotiation. Employers often agree to shorten garden leave in exchange for a negotiated settlement or confirmation that you will comply with your restrictions.
Take legal advice if restrictions seem unreasonable — if the post-employment restrictions that follow garden leave seem disproportionate, an employment solicitor can advise on their likely enforceability before you act.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I take a holiday during garden leave?+

Yes — you continue to accrue holiday during garden leave and can take it. Your employer can also require you to take accrued holiday during garden leave, provided they give at least twice the length of the holiday as advance notice. If you have significant accrued holiday at the start of garden leave, it may be worth agreeing when you will take it to avoid a dispute about payment at the end of employment.

What happens if my employer stops paying me during garden leave?+

Stopping pay during garden leave is a repudiatory breach of contract. You can accept that breach and treat yourself as released from your obligations — including any remaining notice period and potentially post-employment restrictions. However, accepting a repudiatory breach is legally significant and should not be done without taking employment law advice, as the consequences depend on the specific circumstances.

Can my employer contact me while I'm on garden leave?+

Yes. Your employer can contact you for a handover, to answer questions, or to return company property. However, you are generally not expected to carry out substantive work during garden leave — that is the point of it. If your employer is regularly requiring you to work during garden leave, this undermines the garden leave arrangement and you may be able to argue you are not actually on garden leave but are being required to work your notice.

Does garden leave count as employment for IR35 or self-employment purposes?+

Garden leave is a period of active employment — you remain an employee throughout. You cannot take on self-employed work or work through a limited company for a competitor during garden leave. For IR35 purposes, you remain on PAYE. The only way to start new self-employed or contracting work during garden leave is if your employer explicitly permits it, which would be unusual in practice.