Home Assistant Release Notes

Home Assistant 2026.10! 🎉

Last week, Nabu Casa dropped: Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we’re renaming ours. Home Assistant Cloud is on its way to becoming Home Assistant Link. Same service, new name. I love that title, by the way. If you haven’t read the story behind it yet, go have a look, and tell us what you think. The change is planned for the December release, so there is still time. 🏎️

Now, I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m an automation person. Dashboards are lovely and I admire everyone who builds a pretty one, but for me, automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [Learn more] are what make a smart home actually smart. So you can imagine how happy I am with what’s in this release. One of the most powerful features you never thought you’d need has been sitting in Home Assistant for years: trigger IDs. Give your triggersA trigger is the part of an automation that makes the automation start when something specific happens, for example, when the sun sets, a door opens, or a button is pressed. [Learn more] an ID, and one automation can do the job of two, three, or five. It was also tucked away in a menu, you had to invent the IDs yourself, and then remember which was which. Plenty of you never found it, and that’s on us. …

Home Assistant 2026.9! 🎉

I’ll be honest: Modbus has never been the flashiest part of Home Assistant. It quietly powers solar inverters, heat pumps, and energy meters, but only if you’re comfortable hand-writing your own register map in YAML, a real wall that’s kept a huge category of devices out of reach. This release finally makes room on the bus: integrations that already know how a device talks over Modbus, sharing a single connection instead of fighting over it, so you simply pick your device in the UI like anything else in Home Assistant. It won’t show up in a screenshot, but modernizing Modbus is hands-down my favorite change this release. 🔧

I’m also really looking forward to jumping on the new Cloud voice processing myself and putting it through its paces. We’re a household with a non-English main language, and if you’ve ever run a private voice assistant in one, you know exactly how fast accents and background noise trip things up. This new speech-to-text engine specifically targets those pain points, so I’m very curious to see how it holds up against my own accent. 😉 …

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Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube on August 5, 2026, at 20:00 GMT / 12:00 PT / 21:00 CET!

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ESPHome Starter Kit launch party livestream on August 12 There’s more to look forward to next week: the ESPHome Starter Kit is launching, and you’re invited to the official launch party! 🚀 Join the ESPHome team and their partners at Apollo Automation on the ESPHome YouTube channel on August 12 at 21:00 CEST. Familiar faces are dropping by to celebrate lift-off, too: Reed from Smart Home Solver, Simon from Simon Says Home Assistant, and Gavin from HomeTech.fm.

Home Assistant 2026.8! 🎉

Hi, I’m Ashley, the Technical Program Manager at the Open Home Foundation. With Frenck taking a well-deserved break, Bram and I are teaming up to handle things this time around.

We have been working on a lot over the past few weeks, and I’m excited to share some of what we have done for this release! …