*Home Assistant Blog — Homelab — *
Summary
Home Assistant 2026.8, introduced by Open Home Foundation Technical Program Manager Ashley alongside Bram while Frenck is on break, focuses on making the platform usable without technical expertise. New Home Assistant OS installations now use a standard web address without the ":8123" port suffix, and users can change the port, listening network connection, and trusted proxies from the interface, with settings automatically reverting after five minutes if unconfirmed; existing installations and YAML-based configurations are migrated or left unchanged. The release removes "advanced" and "expert" labels in around 43 places across the app, documentation, and companion apps, and renames Developer Tools to simply "Tools." Home Assistant Cloud has been redesigned by contributor @klejejs, replacing its single settings page with a per-feature overview and adding a guided step-by-step setup for new users. Users can also now rename entity IDs themselves and control their ordering, and the post separately promotes an ESPHome Starter Kit launch party livestream on August 12 at 21:00 CEST.
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!
If there’s one thread tying this release together, it’s a direction we care about: making Home Assistant something you don’t need to be technical to use. This release is another step along that path.
Enjoy the release!
A huge thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible! And a special shout-out to @frenck and @bramkragten who helped write the release notes this release. Also, @piitaya, @RaHehl, and @farmio for putting effort into tweaking its contents. Thanks to them, these release notes are in great shape. ❤️
One of the directions we care about most for Home Assistant is making it simpler to pick up and use, without compromising on capability. It’s something we have been working toward for a long time, and it runs through our roadmap and goals for this year. We cannot do it overnight though, so we keep listening to your feedback to make sure we are fixing the things that actually get in your way. If there is something you would like to see, we would love for you to weigh in. Every comment helps shape what comes next.
This release brings together some of that work. It may never be truly finished, and that is fine, but it is something we hold close: the more people who can use Home Assistant, whatever their technical ability, the better.
Ever wondered why the address for your own home has a random number stuck on the end? So did we. For years, reaching Home Assistant meant remembering to add :8123 to the address, a little piece of technical trivia that everyone simply had to learn. This release starts to put that right.
New installations of “Home Assistant OS”Home Assistant OS, the Home Assistant Operating System, is an embedded, minimalistic, operating system designed to run the Home Assistant ecosystem on single board computers (like the Raspberry Pi) or Virtual Machines. It includes Home Assistant Core, the Home Assistant Supervisor, and supports apps. Home Assistant Supervisor keeps it up to date, removing the need for you to manage an operating system. Home Assistant Operating System is the recommended installation type for most users. now use a normal web address by default, with no number to add on the end. You reach your home the same way you reach any website. Nothing extra to remember, nothing extra to type.
If you are already running Home Assistant, nothing changes and there is nothing you need to do. This only affects new installations of Home Assistant OS. Your existing installation is completely unchanged, keeps the exact port it has always used, and keeps working just as before. If everything works today, the simplest thing is to leave it exactly as it is.
You do not have to change anything, but if you would like the cleaner address, or need to change the port for another reason, you can now do it yourself from the interface. The same screen also holds a few more options, like choosing which network connection Home Assistant listens on and setting trusted proxies, for the setups that need them.
Changing something as fundamental as the port your home lives on can feel nerve-wracking, so we made it hard to get stuck. When you change the web server settings, Home Assistant applies the new configuration and then waits for you to confirm everything still works. If you do not confirm within five minutes, it assumes something went wrong, puts your previous settings back, and restarts. And if the new settings cannot be applied at all, it falls back right away. So if you ever lock yourself out with the wrong setting, you do not have to do anything: wait a few minutes, and Home Assistant returns you to where you were.
One thing to keep in mind: anything that reaches Home Assistant using the old address may need updating to match the new port, such as your bookmarks or other services and tools you have connected, including the mobile app. If your setup works today, that is a good reason to leave it as it is.
If you currently set up the web server in YAMLYAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is used to store and transmit data in a structured format. In Home Assistant, YAML is used for configuration, for example in the configuration.yaml or automations.yaml files. [Learn more], you do not need to change anything. The first time you start Home Assistant after updating, your settings move into the interface for you, and you manage them there from then on. You might also see a repair appear, just to let you know your settings were imported; it can point you to tidying up the old YAML if you like, but nothing breaks either way.
A word comes up around Home Assistant a lot: advanced. But what does it actually mean, and who gets to decide what counts as advanced and what does not? Too often it is a label that quietly tells people a feature is not for them. We want Home Assistant to be approachable for everyone, so this release removes some of that language.
The clearest place to start is the words themselves. Labels like advanced and expert were dotted around Home Assistant. Words like these can be discouraging: they suggest a feature is not for you and steer you away from trying it, even when it is perfectly approachable. This release removes that wording in around 43 places, across the app, its documentation, and the companion apps. None of these features changed. Instead of rating your skill, the wording now simply describes what each one does.
A big thank you to everyone who helped comb through and clean this up! 👏
In the same spirit, Developer Tools is now simply Tools. It has always been a useful spot for everyone, whether you are checking the stateThe state holds the information of interest of an entity, for example, if a light is on or off. Each entity has exactly one state and the state only holds one value at a time. However, entities can store attributes related to that state such as brightness, color, or a unit of measurement. [Learn more] of your “devices”A device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities., testing a templateA template is an automation definition that can include variables for the action or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions. [Learn more], or reloading part of your setup, and you never needed to be a developer to use it. The shorter name matches how people actually use it, and feels a little friendlier to open.
Home Assistant Cloud by Nabu Casa is how many people add remote access, fast and private voice, encrypted backupsHome Assistant has built-in functionality to create files containing a copy of your configuration. This can be used to restore your Home Assistant as well as migrate to a new system. The backup feature is available for all installation types. [Learn more], and more to their home, all while supporting the project at the same time. Until now, everything it offers lived on a single long page of switches and settings. This release gives that page a proper redesign.
The main page is now a clean overview. Each feature (remote access, backups, voice assistants, the companion app, and more) has its own space, so you can see what you have turned on at a glance. The settings for each one move onto their own page, which keeps the overview tidy and makes every feature easier to understand on its own.
The bigger change is for anyone just getting started. There is now a guided setup that walks you through Home Assistant Cloud step by step, instead of leaving you to find your way around a wall of options. If it is not a good moment, you can put it off and pick it up again later.
A big thank you to @klejejs for this redesign!
Behind every deviceA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. and sensorSensors return information about a thing, for instance the level of water in a tank. [Learn more] sits an entity ID, a short name such as light.kitchen_ceiling that your automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [Learn more], scriptsScripts are components that allow you to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on. [Learn more], and dashboards use to refer to it. Most of the time they look after themselves. But when you do want them neat and consistent, you should be the one deciding how they read.
Some earlier work looked at building entity IDs automatically from the areaAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that represents a room or space in your home, such as the living room, kitchen, or garage. [Learn more] a device belongs to. Your feedback told us this suited some people but not everyone. So this release takes a more flexible route and puts you in charge: you can rename an entity ID yourself, and control how it is ordered, so your entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] follow whatever naming pattern makes sense to you.
Thanks to @arturpragacz and @piitaya for this work.
Home Assistant is changing how it keeps track of your devices behind the scenes. Until now, if one physical deviceA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. was set up through two different integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more], Home Assistant merged them into a single device. Details that can only hold one value, such as the model or serial number, could then clash. From this release, each integration keeps its own device entry, so nothing gets collapsed together.
When you update, any devices that were merged this way are separated automatically, and their entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] move to the right device for you. Most people will not notice a thing. In the rarer cases where a device was set up through more than one integration, you might see it appear twice, once per integration, and Home Assistant may raise a repair to let you know.
There is nothing you need to do. Your automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [Learn more] and scriptsScripts are components that allow you to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on. [Learn more] keep working, because Home Assistant still sends actions to the right devices after the split. The only things that might need a second look are automations that point to a device by its ID directly, or the occasional unusual setup. If a repair appears, just follow it.
This is groundwork for more flexible device handling we are building toward over the coming months, so think of it as a step along the way rather than the finished picture.
If you build a custom integrationA custom integration is an integration that has been created by someone from the Home Assistant community and has been published for others to use at their own risk. Custom integrations are not supported by the Home Assistant project. They are not reviewed or tested by the Home Assistant development team and thus may negatively impact the stability of your Home Assistant instance. An example of a custom integration is the Spook integration., most need no changes at all. If yours works with device details directly, the developer blog walks through what changed. There is no rush: the previous approach keeps working for now, so you have plenty of time.
Thanks to @emontnemery for this work.
Last release, purpose-specific triggers and conditions became the friendlier way to build automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [Learn more]: you describe the moment you care about, like when the front door opens, instead of piecing it together from the technical parts underneath. This release adds two more of them.
Vibration now has conditions to match its triggers. On top of reacting the moment vibration starts or stops, you can check whether something is vibrating (or not) as part of a bigger automation, for example, only sending a “laundry is done” message once the washing machine has actually stopped shaking.
Moon gains a trigger and matching conditions. You can start an automation the moment the moon enters a new phase, or check the current phase as part of a bigger automation. Point it at the full moon, the new moon, or any change of phase, and let your home take it from there, whether that is mood lighting, a reminder, or just a bit of fun. 🌙
Thanks, @nielsrowinbik!
Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰
We welcome the following new integrations in this release:
It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing ones keep getting better too. Here are some of the noteworthy improvements this release:
s ), plus a datapoint type (DPT) reference and a device view for your project data. On top of that, all KNX entities now restore their state after a reload or restart. Thanks,@farmio !One thing we are incredibly proud of in Home Assistant is our integration quality scale. This scale helps us and our contributors to ensure integrations are of high quality, maintainable, and provide the best possible user experience.
This release, we celebrate several integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have improved their quality scale:
This is a huge achievement for these integrations and their maintainers. The effort and dedication required to reach these quality levels is significant, as it involves extensive testing, documentation, error handling, and often complete rewrites of parts of the integration.
A big thank you to all the contributors involved! 👏
While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.
The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:
Time for a little cleaning, and no, we did not wait for spring! The following “integrations”Integrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] are no longer available as of this release:
There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes:
If you have set up Home Assistant recently, you might notice a short, optional survey asking how your first experience went. It is entirely up to you, and every response helps us make getting started smoother for the next person. Thank you to everyone who shares their thoughts! 💛
The template tool in Tools is where you try out “templates”A template is an automation definition that can include variables for the action or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions. [Learn more] and watch the result update as you type. This release gives it a more comfortable layout: the editor and the result now sit in a split view you can drag to resize, and you can switch between side by side and stacked, whichever suits what you are working on. Your choice is remembered for next time.
Thanks, @maartenla!
On the picture elements card, a tap could trigger the element next to the one you meant, or hit nothing at all, and some elements could not be tapped. Taps now go to the nearest icon or label, so every element can be reached, and tapping a label’s text always triggers that label. Thanks, @RaHehl!
If you track more than one battery in the energy dashboard, you can now give each one a capacity. The combined state of charge is then weighted by size, so a small full battery and a large empty one no longer average out to a misleading number. Batteries without a capacity set keep using the plain average, so nothing changes unless you want it to. Thanks, @MindFreeze!
Browsing for the right song, photo, or film used to mean clicking through folder after folder. Now, integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that provide media can offer search right in the media browser, so you type what you are looking for and jump straight to it.
What you can search depends on the media source. Immich, for example, gained a smart search that finds photos by what is actually in them rather than by their filename, and Overseerr lets you search for and request movies and shows without leaving Home Assistant.
Thanks, @zweckj, @mib1185, and @felixschndr!
Your most-used cards are now easier to find. In the card picker’s “By Card” tab, you can now mark the cards you use most as favorites using the icon in the corner of each card. Favorited cards float to the top of the section, so if you reach for the same card again and again while building similar dashboards, it’s always right there waiting for you. Tap the icon again to remove a card from your favorites.
Thanks, @piitaya, @laupalombi, and everyone who suggested this at a Release Party!
Managing who can unlock your Z-Wave lock just got a lot more capable. Powered by Z-Wave JS’s new Access Control API, the Z-Wave JS app 1.6.0 brings a heavily revised interface: every supported lock now gets a dedicated Access Control tab. For now, this lives in Z-Wave JS UI rather than in the Z-Wave panel in Home Assistant.
Users, their credentials, and a full audit trail, all in one place.
Depending on what your lock supports, you can now give each user several credentials of more than one type, so the same person can have a PIN and a fingerprint, or multiple of both. New credentials can be learned on the lock itself: start the enrollment from the interface, then present the finger or type the PIN. There is also an audit log of every change, admin code management for locks that use one, and the ability to move credentials between users or delete them in bulk.
Update the Z-Wave JS app to 1.6.0 or later, then open Z-Wave JS UI to find the new tab. Thanks, @AlCalzone!
There is even more packed into this release. Here are some of the other changes worth a mention:
We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2026.8 in August. These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch release once a week, aiming for Friday.
Update frontend to 20260729.6 (@bramkragten -#178470 )
Teslemetry: convert streamed tyre pressure and isolation resistance to their declared units (@Bre77 -#177541 )
handle_safe_area opt-out topanel_custom and fix KNX panel (@farmio -#178598 )gameserverip field in Steam Online dataclass (@tr4nt0r -#178751 )Show artwork and a play button when opening a Sonos music library album (@bharat -#177510 )
errors could beNone in Shelly Wall Display status (@bieniu -#179207 )floor heating mode (@bieniu -#179435 )Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!
Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.
Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker to get it fixed! Or check our help page for guidance on more places you can go.
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If you would like to wear your support: the Open Home Foundation store just added new T-shirts featuring ESPHome, Music Assistant, and a fresh Home Assistant design, all in classic black (or Dark Mode, if you prefer!). They are versatile, built to last, and best of all, every purchase helps fund the foundation’s work. Grab yours from the store.
We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes it is inevitable.
We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:
AirNow
The station radius option has been removed. The 2026 AirNow API no longer uses a distance parameter, so the radius had no effect on which reporting station was used. Existing entries are updated automatically, and any radius you had set is discarded. No action is needed.
Gardena Bluetooth
The valve’s `activation_reason` sensor now reports a fixed set of values instead of free-form text. If you have automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/automation/), scriptsScripts are components that allow you to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/scripts/), or “templates”A template is an automation definition that can include variables for the action or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/automation/templating/) that match on the old text values, update them to match the new ones.
Edifier Infrared
If you set up the Edifier Infrared integration for the R2000DB or R2730DB speakers, some buttons were mapped to the wrong infrared codes (on the R2730DB, power and mute were swapped). The mappings are now corrected and migrated automatically. If you built automationsAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/automation/) or scriptsScripts are components that allow you to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/scripts/) around the old, incorrect buttons, update them to match.
Ohme
The Ohme energy sensor has been removed. It reported an estimate of the energy stored in the car’s battery rather than the energy delivered by the charger, which caused confusing jumps in the energy dashboard, and the vendor’s API no longer provides a useful value.
If you tracked this sensor, use an Integration - Riemann sum helperA helper is a virtual entity you create inside Home Assistant. It is not backed by a physical device. Helpers store values, track state, or do calculations that your automations and dashboards need. [Learn more] on a power sensor to estimate the energy instead.
(@dan-r - #174664) (Ohme documentation)
Paperless-ngx
Paperless-ngx now requires a newer version of your Paperless-ngx server. The minimum supported server version is raised to 2.19, which also restores compatibility with Paperless-ngx 3.0. If your Paperless-ngx server is on version 2.18 or older, update it before you update Home Assistant.
Robot vacuums
The deprecated `battery_level` property has been removed from the vacuum entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/configuration/entities_domains/) of several integrations. If you use a robot vacuum’s battery level in an automationAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/automation/), scriptScripts are components that allow you to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on. [\[Learn more\]](/docs/scripts/), or on a dashboard, use the vacuum’s battery sensor instead.
This affects the following integrations:
(@gjohansson-ST - #175681, #175684, #175685, #175686, #175687, #175688, #175691, #175764)
ScreenLogic
The option to configure the pollingData polling is the process of querying a device or service at regular intervals to check for updates or retrieve data. By defining a custom polling interval, you can control how frequently your system checks for new data, which can help optimize performance and reduce unnecessary network traffic. [\[Learn more\]](/common-tasks/general/#defining-a-custom-polling-interval) interval has been removed from ScreenLogic. Home Assistant now polls the integration at a fixed interval. If you need a different update frequency, you can [set your own polling interval](/common-tasks/general/#defining-a-custom-polling-interval) or trigger an update with the `homeassistant.update_entity` action.
UniFi Protect
Support for UniFi Protect AI Port devices has been removed. These devices only ever exposed diagnostic sensors, all disabled by default, and are not part of the UniFi Protect public API the integration is moving to. The AI Port device and its sensors are removed automatically when you update. You can still configure the AI Port directly in UniFi Protect.
(@RaHehl - #174378) (UniFi Protect documentation)
Detection scores are no longer available. The detection binary sensors (motion, person, vehicle, animal, and the smart-audio alarm sensors) now take their state from the UniFi Protect public API, which carries no per-event score, so their event_score attribute is gone and automations that filter on it need another condition. The event id and the detected types moved to the new Motion detection, Smart detection, and Sound detection event entities.
(@RaHehl - #174948) (UniFi Protect documentation)
UniFi Protect 7.1 or newer is now required. On an older console the integration reports that the version is too old instead of setting up. Update UniFi Protect to 7.1 or newer to keep using it.
If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following changes are the most notable for this release:
Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2026.8.
Original article: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2026/08/05/release-20268/ Source: Home Assistant Blog