Garden leave is when your employer tells you to stay at home for the duration of your notice period, while continuing to pay your salary in the normal way. The phrase comes from the old joke about staying home and tending the garden while waiting for your notice to expire.
You’re still an employee throughout. Your contract is still in force. Your salary keeps arriving. Your benefits keep ticking along. But you’re not in the office, not attending meetings, not seeing clients, and not doing any work for the employer. To the outside world, you’ve effectively left. To HMRC and to your contract, you’re fully employed until your notice ends.
Why employers use garden leave
The single most common reason is to keep you away from the competition. If you’ve resigned to join a competitor, your current employer has a problem: every day you stay in the office, you’re building a fresher picture of current strategy, client relationships, internal politics, and live deals. Garden leave is the standard way to freeze your knowledge at the moment of resignation.
The second reason is protecting clients. In sales-heavy roles, especially in financial services and consulting, your relationships with clients are a significant part of the employer’s asset base. Garden leave gives them several months to introduce your successor to those clients without you being in the picture.
The third reason is just smoothing the transition. Where you’ve left on good terms but the role involves sensitive information, both sides sometimes prefer a clean break rather than a few weeks of awkward overlap.
When can your employer put you on garden leave?
Whether your employer can put you on garden leave depends entirely on what your contract says. Most modern UK employment contracts for mid-senior roles contain an explicit garden leave clause that gives the employer the right to do so at any point during the notice period. If your contract has that clause, your employer can invoke it unilaterally; you don’t have to consent.
If your contract has no garden leave clause, the legal position is more complicated. The employer can ask you to stay home but can’t insist if you have a contractual right to work (which most employees implicitly do, even if the contract doesn’t spell it out). In practice, most employees prefer to stay home with full pay than turn up to an office where they’re not wanted, so this doesn’t usually become a fight.
The exception is roles where being away from the work materially damages your career: skills that degrade fast (in some tech roles), client-facing positions where market presence matters, or roles with public visibility. In those cases, contesting unilateral garden leave can be worth doing. Take advice before pushing back.
What you can and can’t do during garden leave
You’re still employed, so the standard contractual obligations all still apply.
You can’t start a new job. Even if your new employer is desperate for you to start, taking up a new role while on garden leave breaches your current contract. The new employer might also be unwilling to accept the legal risk of you starting early.
You can’t work for yourself. Consulting work, freelance gigs, or starting a business in the same field all count as work and breach your contract. Working in a completely unrelated field (driving Uber, helping out at a friend’s bakery) is usually fine but check your contract for blanket exclusivity clauses.
You can’t contact clients. Any contact with the employer’s clients on behalf of yourself or a future employer breaches your non-solicit obligations, regardless of how informal the contact looks. Don’t send the “just letting you know I’m leaving” message yourself; let the employer handle it.
You can’t recruit colleagues. Many contracts include non-solicitation of staff. Inviting a colleague to come with you to the new firm during garden leave is a clear breach. Worth waiting until your employment formally ends.
You can take holiday. Holiday accrued during garden leave can be taken as normal, though employers often require you to use up accrued holiday during garden leave rather than be paid out for it at the end.
You can do almost anything else. Travel, do training courses, prepare for your new role through reading and learning that doesn’t involve client work, look after your family, work on your fitness. The point of garden leave is that you’re not contributing to the competitive landscape against your current employer; what you do with your own time outside of that is your own.
One thing worth thinking about if you’re considering going independent after this role: garden leave is unusually good time to lay the administrative groundwork for self-employment, since you’ve got paid time and no client work to occupy you. Freelance Toolkit UK has the practical setup checklist for going independent, covering the sole-trader vs limited-company decision, tax registration timing, and the early-stage paperwork.
Garden leave and your benefits
Because you’re still employed, your benefits continue unchanged. Private medical insurance, life cover, pension contributions, share scheme participation, all of it carries on as normal until your last day of employment.
This is one of the big practical reasons employees often prefer garden leave over PILON. Pension contributions during a 3-month garden leave can be worth several thousand pounds that you’d lose under a PILON arrangement. Medical insurance during garden leave keeps you covered through any ongoing treatment.
Bonus payments are trickier. If a bonus falls during the garden leave period, whether you’re entitled to it depends on the bonus scheme rules. Most schemes require you to be employed AND not on notice on the payment date. Garden leave usually means you’re both employed and on notice, which most scheme rules treat as ineligible. Worth checking the specific wording.
Garden leave and restrictive covenants
This is where garden leave gets strategically important. Most UK contracts include restrictive covenants that survive the end of employment: non-compete, non-solicit (of clients and of staff), and confidentiality. These typically run for a defined period after your employment ends.
The key question is when that period starts. Restrictive covenants run from the end of your employment, which under garden leave is the end of your notice period, not the start of your garden leave. So a 6-month non-compete after a 3-month garden leave keeps you out of the market for 9 months in total.
Compare this to PILON, where employment ends immediately and the 6-month non-compete starts ticking down on day one. PILON keeps you out for 6 months total versus 9 under garden leave.
Some employers use garden leave precisely to extend your time out of the market. If you’re negotiating an exit and have flexibility, this is one of the factors to weigh. Sometimes the courts will give credit for time spent on garden leave when assessing whether a non-compete is reasonable, but the default assumption is that they stack rather than overlap.
How garden leave is announced
Your employer will usually tell you in a meeting on the day your garden leave starts. They’ll typically also confirm in writing what the arrangement is: that you’re on garden leave from a specific date through to the end of your notice, that your access to systems and the office is revoked from that date, that your benefits continue, and that the standard contractual obligations remain in force.
If your employer is putting you on garden leave abruptly (rather than letting you work the notice you offered), they will sometimes also ask you to confirm in writing that you’ll comply with the contract during the period. That’s standard and not something to push back on unless there’s something specific in the wording you disagree with.
How to handle garden leave well
Treat it like extended annual leave with restrictions, not like an early retirement. Three months at home with no structure can be surprisingly hard. Some practical things people who’ve done it well tend to do.
Block your calendar into themed weeks: travel, family time, professional development, fitness. Without structure, the weeks blur and you arrive at your new job tired rather than rested.
Use the time on reading and skill-building that isn’t tied to your current employer’s competitive landscape. Books, courses, certifications. Coming back to work having finished something gives you a small but real edge.
Get the medical and dental check-ups you’ve been putting off while the private medical cover is still in force. It ends on your last day.
Plan your start at the new role thoughtfully. Don’t do any actual work for the new employer during garden leave, but you can read publicly available information about them and prepare. A short note to your new manager confirming the dates and offering to meet for coffee before you start (outside their office) is professional and welcome.
The summary
Garden leave is the most generous of the three exit modes in pure cash terms (full salary plus benefits, with no work done in return), but it’s also the most restrictive in terms of what you can do with the time, and it pushes your post-termination restrictions further into the future. If you’re moving to a competitor and have a long non-compete, the date arithmetic matters: garden leave plus non-compete can keep you out of the market significantly longer than PILON plus non-compete.
For how garden leave fits into the overall picture, see the complete UK resignation guide. For how it compares to PILON directly, see the PILON guide.
This is general information, not legal advice. Garden leave clauses and post-termination restrictions are highly fact specific. If you’re moving to a competitor or your contract has unusual wording, take advice from an employment-law solicitor before you act.