Garden leave is when your employer tells you to stay at home during your notice period while continuing to pay your full salary. You remain legally employed throughout, your benefits keep running, and every contractual obligation (confidentiality, non-compete, non-solicit) stays in force. Your employment ends on the same date it would have if you'd worked the notice in the office.
The phrase 'garden leave' comes from the old British joke about ex-civil servants tending their gardens during a long notice. The concept is more useful than the name suggests. It sits between working your notice (you're in the office, doing the job) and PILON (employment ends immediately and the unworked notice is paid out). Garden leave keeps the employment running on paper but takes you out of the operational picture.
From the employer's side, garden leave is mostly about competitive protection. If you've resigned to join a competitor, every day you stay in the office is another day you build current knowledge: live deals, internal strategy, fresh client relationships. Garden leave freezes that at the day you resigned. It also protects the transition of clients to your successor, the recruitment of a replacement, and any internal investigation or restructuring the employer wants to do quietly.
From your side, garden leave can be the most generous of the three modes in pure financial terms. You receive full salary plus all contractual benefits (pension, medical cover, share scheme participation) without having to work. Time you'd have spent on operational tasks is now your own. Holiday accrues normally. Many employers require accrued leave to be taken during garden leave rather than paid out, which is fine if you'd have wanted the time off anyway.
The restrictions are the same as if you were still at work. You can't start a new job, can't do consulting in the same field, can't contact clients on behalf of yourself or a future employer, can't recruit colleagues to follow you, can't disclose confidential information. The reason these still bind is that you're still legally employed; garden leave is just a change in your physical location, not the contractual status.
Whether your employer can put you on garden leave depends on your contract. Most modern mid-senior UK contracts include an explicit garden leave clause. If yours has one, the employer can put you on garden leave unilaterally at any point during your notice. If your contract is silent, you may have an implied right to work, particularly in roles where being out of the market materially damages your career. In practice, most people don't fight it.
Garden leave interacts with restrictive covenants in a way that needs care. Non-competes typically run from the end of employment, which under garden leave is the end of the notice period. So a three-month garden leave followed by a six-month non-compete keeps you out of the market for nine months total. Compare to PILON, where employment ends immediately and the six-month non-compete starts on day one, total six months out.
Some employers use garden leave specifically because of this stacking effect. If they want to delay your move to a competitor, putting you on garden leave for the full notice period adds that time to the start of your non-compete. The longer your notice, the more this matters. Senior contracts with six-month notices plus twelve-month non-competes are designed to keep ex-employees out of the market for up to eighteen months.
Practical recommendation: if you're being put on garden leave, get the start and end dates confirmed in writing, plus any specific restrictions the employer wants to impose during the period. Read your post-termination restrictions in light of the garden leave timing. Use the garden leave calculator to see the total time-out-of-market including any non-compete period. Plan a productive use of the time; three months at home without structure is harder than it looks.
General information about UK employment law. For your specific situation, contact ACAS or an employment-law solicitor.