A candidate accepts an offer in June. Their start date isn’t until September. In between, three other recruiters call them. Their current manager makes a counter-offer. The hiring manager who fought to get their offer approved starts to wonder if the seat will even be filled by the person who signed it.
This is what a 90-day notice period looks like from the inside. It plays out regularly across India’s technology sector, where roughly one in three IT roles carries a 90-day notice clause, among the longest standard notice windows for private-sector professional employment anywhere.
Employers see it as necessary for business continuity. Employees increasingly see it as out of step with how fast the market moves. Recruiters sit in between, trying to close offers before either side changes their mind.
The debate isn’t new. What’s changed is the pressure it’s under. AI-driven hiring cycles have gotten faster everywhere except the one stage that Indian labour contracts still control: the exit.
The Employer’s Case for 90-Day Notice Periods
Employers rarely frame long notice periods as a control mechanism. They frame it as risk management, and for certain roles, the argument holds up. Rajiv Nair, HR leader and CHRO & ESG Leader at Ramco Systems, ties the requirement to specific business risk rather than blanket policy.
“90 days is justified only for critical roles where sudden exit affects customers, product delivery, IP, compliance or business continuity,” says Nair.
Nair’s framing is narrower than what most companies actually practise. In reality, the clause gets applied uniformly across bands and functions, whether or not the underlying risk is present. Three specific arguments do the heavy lifting when employers defend it.
Knowledge Transfer Needs
The most common employer argument centres on continuity. A senior engineer who owns a critical microservice, or an account lead managing a nine-figure client relationship, carries information no handover document fully captures. Employers argue that compressing this transfer into two or three weeks risks losing institutional knowledge built over years.
Difficult Backfills
Specialist roles in AI, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure are hard to fill quickly. The skill gap in these areas widened from 18% in 2023 to 25% in 2025, according to hiring-timeline research compiled by Wisemonk. That gap means senior AI/ML and cybersecurity roles can already take 50 to 70 days to fill, before a departing employee’s notice period is even factored in. A shorter notice window, employers argue, would leave critical seats empty longer.
Client Commitments
For IT services firms operating under staffing-based contracts, an abrupt exit can trigger contractual penalties or force emergency reallocation of billable resources. This is the historical root of the 90-day standard. It remains the strongest version of the employer’s argument, though it applies far more narrowly today than blanket policies suggest.
The Employee’s Case Against 90-Day Notice Periods
Radhika Puri, CHRO at Pangasa Chetana Designs, makes the opposing case from the candidate’s side of the table, pointing to how fast the market itself now moves.
“They are no longer relevant in today’s day and age as tech companies are growing so fast and time is the most important resource,” says Puri when talking about 90-day notice periods. “Companies expect new joiners to pick up the threads swiftly and deliver.”
Puri’s argument is that employees feel a mismatch directly every time they change jobs. Employers want new hires to move fast once they join. But the same employers, acting as the previous employer in someone else’s hiring process, hold that person back before they can even start.
For employees, the practical costs are concrete:
- Reduced job mobility. A candidate weighing two offers with different notice terms often loses the better one because the new employer can’t wait three months for the seat to open.
- Missed opportunities. Roles tied to specific project timelines or funding rounds can close before a 90-day notice period runs out.
- Competitive disadvantage. Candidates serving 30-day notice routinely get preferred over equally qualified candidates serving 90 days, purely on availability.
There’s also a fairness argument that shows up repeatedly in employee forums. Roughly 90% believed the 90-day notice period was misused by employers as an informal retention tool, according to workplace research firm Calibr. That number may not hold up as a precise industry-wide figure, but the sentiment tracks with what recruiters hear directly from candidates.
How Recruiters View 90-Day Notice Candidates
Recruiters sit at the friction point between these two positions, and their preferences reveal how much notice period actually shapes hiring decisions on the ground.
| Recruiter Concern | Why It Matters | Typical Response |
| Hiring urgency | Business need often can’t wait 90 days for a critical seat | Preference shifts toward candidates with 30 or 45-day notice |
| Offer drop-off risk | Longer notice windows give competitors and counter-offers more time to intervene | Weekly check-ins during notice period, early-joining bonuses |
| Candidate availability | Two similarly qualified candidates rarely have equal notice terms | Availability becomes a tie-breaker, sometimes the deciding factor |
Counter-offers from a candidate’s current employer account for roughly 42% of offer drop-offs in Indian tech hiring. Competing offers that arrive during a long notice window account for another 31%, according to hiring research published by Quantalent. Nearly three-quarters of dropped offers trace back to what happens during the notice period itself, not to anything wrong with the original offer.
This is why recruiters increasingly treat notice period length as a filtering criterion earlier in the pipeline, sometimes before technical fit is even fully assessed.
The Impact on Indian Tech Hiring
Put the employer’s case, the employee’s case, and the recruiter’s view together, and one pattern stands out across all three when it comes to 90-day notice periods. Puri connects it directly to how much faster business decisions move now.
“This [90-day notice period] leads to delays in processes and operations. Many a time, current companies retain the high-performing people, and on the other hand, the employer giving the offer also steps back and withdraws offers, as AI has disrupted the market and results need to be delivered in a fast-track mode. This delays the hiring process and ends up in losing out on hiring the right fitment people for the job,” says Puri.
Two things happen at once during a long notice period, and neither is anyone’s fault in isolation. The current employer gets time to act, through counter-offers, internal promotions, or simply a renewed conversation about the employee’s future that looks more appealing over three months than it did on the day of resignation. Retaining a strong performer is a legitimate goal.
At the same time, business needs on the receiving end can shift. A hiring manager who opened a requisition in April, expecting the market and the team’s priorities to look the same in three months, sometimes finds they don’t. Roadmaps move, budgets get reallocated, and an offer that made sense at signing may no longer fit the plan by the time the candidate is free to join.
The 90-day standard doesn’t just affect individual hiring decisions caught in that gap. It shapes structural patterns across the market, visible in four distinct ways.
Time-to-Hire
India’s average time-to-hire across sectors runs 35 to 45 days. But for senior tech engineers specifically, end-to-end hiring timelines stretch to 12 to 16 weeks once the notice period is factored in, according to hiring-timeline data compiled by Quantalent. Active sourcing, screening, and interviews typically wrap up in 3 to 5 weeks. The rest, often the majority of the timeline, is the candidate waiting out their notice.
Offer Acceptance Rates
Offer dropout in Indian tech hiring reached 28% across Global Capability Centres and 38% at Indian product startups in 2025, per SHRM India’s 2025 Talent Acquisition Report, cited in hiring research by Quantalent. Series B and C startups offering aggressive equity saw dropout rates exceeding 40%. Candidates at this stage often hold multiple offers open across their notice period and pick the best one closer to the actual joining date.
Talent Availability
Long notice periods effectively shrink the pool of candidates a company can consider for time-sensitive roles. A hiring manager under pressure to fill a seat within six weeks may simply exclude every candidate serving 90-day notice, regardless of how strong their profile is. This isn’t a stated policy at most companies. It happens anyway.
Candidate-Role Fit
This is the cost Puri’s answer points to, and it’s easy to miss if you only track time-to-hire and dropout numbers. When a long notice period causes delay and dropout to compound, companies don’t just lose weeks. They often end up hiring whoever remains available on a shorter timeline rather than the specific candidate they originally wanted.
The role still gets filled, and the numbers might even look fine on a dashboard, but the fit quietly gets weaker. That’s a harder cost to measure than time-to-hire or dropout rate, which is probably why it gets discussed less, even though recruiters and hiring managers raise it constantly in practice.
Are Companies Reconsidering Long Notice Periods?
Some employers are adjusting, though not uniformly, and the shift looks more like negotiated flexibility than policy reversal.
| Approach | How It Works | Where It Shows Up |
| Buyouts | Employee pays the difference between notice served and an earlier release date, calculated as a share of monthly fixed salary | Common at startups and high-growth companies for critical hires; TCS, Infosys, and Wipro largely reject buyout requests tied to handovers |
| Flexible notice arrangements | Notice length scales by role criticality instead of a flat policy across every band | Emerging at some GCCs and product companies; a support engineer and a principal architect may serve very different terms |
| Selective reductions | Companies cut notice for specific functions to match competitor timelines | Most visible in AI and specialist hiring, where a rigid 90-day clause has become a hiring disadvantage |
TPB’s notice period guide covers how buyout formulas and full and final settlement typically interact for employees weighing this route.
Alternatives to the Traditional 90-Day Model
The reconsideration happening at the margins points to a bigger structural question: should notice period be a flat default at all, or a variable tied to actual risk? Nair’s own recommendation answers that question directly, moving past the binary of “keep 90 days” or “scrap it entirely.”
“Better alternative: use a practical 30/60/90-day model based on role criticality, with strong handover, documentation, succession planning, buyout or garden leave where needed,” says Nair.
This framing treats notice period as a tool calibrated to actual business risk, not a uniform contractual default. A few structures that support this shift:
- Role-based notice periods: Instead of applying 90 days across every mid-to-senior employee, tier notice length by how business-critical the role genuinely is. A backend engineer on a shared team doesn’t carry the same continuity risk as a client-facing account director.
- Structured transition programs: Formal handover documentation, cross-training, and knowledge-transfer checklists reduce dependence on any single person’s tenure, which weakens the justification for extended notice in the first place.
- Garden leave approaches: For roles where confidentiality or client relationships pose a real risk, garden leave lets the employer keep the person off active work and away from sensitive information while still paying them. It avoids the friction of trying to extract productive work from someone who has already resigned.
None of these points toward every company abandoning long notice periods. It points toward the flat, one-size-fits-all version of the 90-day clause becoming harder to defend.
Indian courts have periodically flagged excessively long notice clauses as an unreasonable restraint of trade under Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, particularly when applied uniformly to junior and mid-level staff who carry limited continuity risk. That legal exposure, combined with the hiring cost Puri describes, gives companies two separate reasons to revisit blanket 90-day policies rather than one.
In the End…
The 90-day notice period debate isn’t really a fight over a number. It’s a disagreement about who should absorb the cost of transition risk. Does the employer lose a key person, or does the employee lose time and leverage in a market that rewards speed?
Nair’s business-continuity argument and Puri’s talent-market argument aren’t actually opposed. Both point toward the same conclusion from different directions. Notice period length should track the actual risk a role carries, not default to the longest number a contract template allows. Companies that make that distinction early will likely spend less time losing offers to competitors who already have.
FAQs
Is a 90-day notice period legal in India?
Yes, but courts have periodically flagged uniformly applied long notice clauses as an unreasonable restraint of trade under Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, especially when the same 90-day term is applied to junior and mid-level staff who carry limited continuity risk.
Why do Indian tech companies use 90-day notice periods?
Employers point to knowledge transfer for critical roles, difficult backfills in specialist areas like AI and cybersecurity, and contractual client commitments in IT services firms. Rajiv Nair, HR leader and CHRO & ESG Leader at Ramco Systems, argues the clause is justified mainly for roles where a sudden exit affects customers, product delivery, IP, compliance, or business continuity, not as a blanket policy.
Can an employee reduce or buy out a 90-day notice period in India?
Many companies allow employees to pay the difference between the notice served and an earlier release date, calculated as a share of monthly fixed salary. This is common at startups and high-growth companies for critical hires, though firms like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro largely reject buyout requests tied to active handovers.
How does a 90-day notice period affect hiring speed in India?
Senior tech engineer hiring can stretch to 12 to 16 weeks end-to-end once notice period is factored in, even though sourcing, screening, and interviews typically wrap up in 3 to 5 weeks. Counter-offers and competing offers that surface during the notice window account for most offer dropoffs.
What are the alternatives to a flat 90-day notice period?
Nair recommends a practical 30/60/90-day model tied to role criticality, paired with strong handover documentation, succession planning, buyout options, or garden leave where confidentiality or client risk genuinely warrants it.
