The extant literature on non-competes largely focuses on measuring the effects of non-compete enforcement policies. There is little research on the antecedents and details of actual non-compete use, i.e. what are the characteristics or driving forces that make some firms use non-competes while others do not and how exactly are firms using non-competes. Without sufficient knowledge of the antecedents and details of actual non-compete use, it is difficult to specify models predicting outcomes of non-compete use and non-compete enforcement policy. We use original survey data on non-compete use with 2,001 firms matched with government registry data containing a wealth of socio-economic data on the surveyed firms and their 50,051 employees to analyse the antecedents and relative characteristics of both users and non-users of non-competes.