Home Assistant 2026.11 brings many new features to the smart home
The November update introduces the new marketplace, new logic for entity naming, and definable exceptions for automations.
There is one thing in life you can rely on: the monthly updates for the open-source smart home platform Home Assistant. In a blog post, the developers describe the November update, version 2026.11, as the largest ever released. You can find all the changes described in detail there. In this article, I will give you an overview of the most important new features.
Long-time Home Assistant users can look forward to plenty of quality-of-life improvements. These are joined by support for Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN), two-way talk for Matter cameras, and new integrations. The update makes several changes to the system. It is best to first check the list of changes that cannot be undone afterwards, so you don't encounter any surprises with your integrations and extensions.
For beginners, the new Marketplace is particularly interesting: it replaces HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) and makes it easy to install plugins from the Home Assistant community.
Overall, this update shows how important a clean assignment of devices, rooms, and floors is. You should always assign your devices to the correct rooms and, if available, floors. Only then can you take full advantage of some of the new features, such as automatic entity naming, exceptions in automations, and new dashboard functions.
Marketplace, the central place for community plugins
Home Assistant admins usually encounter HACS sooner or later. It is an additional module that provides all the extensions that allow Home Assistant to be truly customized to your own needs. However, the installation is complicated and often poses a hurdle for beginners.
That is now history. HACS is now called Marketplace and is part of the core installation. You can find the Marketplace as a separate entry under Settings. There, you can search for extensions and manage your existing ones.
Both plugins from the official community catalog and custom repositories that you have manually added via a GitHub link are displayed. This can now also be done with the «Add via link» button directly in the Marketplace. For manually added repositories, a GitHub connection will be required in the future so that Home Assistant can read version numbers and download release files.
Those who already use HACS do not need to do anything. All extensions will be carried over and are visible in the Marketplace. There are a few sensible changes there, such as better sorting and filtering functions. No detours are now necessary when configuring plugins after installation.
Exceptions for targets in automations and scripts
In recent years, the development team has gradually added the ability to specify a room, floor, or label as a target for an automation across the board. With the target «ground floor», you can turn off lights on the ground floor. Previously, you had to manually add every single light as a target and update the automation whenever you added a new one.
In itself, this is a good thing, but it has one catch: not all devices in the specified target should always do something. Since no exceptions could be defined, I always had to specify individual devices as targets instead of a group.
After the update, you can finally set exceptions. This works for individual devices, but also for groupings, such as a label or a room. Exceptions are possible for triggers, conditions, and actions.
Streamlined, logical entity names
After several years of preparatory work, Home Assistant is fundamentally changing its naming concept. Names like «Lamp 1 GF Hallway» or «Temperature Thermostat Bathroom» should become unnecessary in the future. If devices are correctly assigned to rooms and floors, Home Assistant already knows their context. This information is now displayed where you need to know it. This means you don't have to clutter the names with details.
According to the developer blog, your old labels will be migrated during the update, but where this is not sensibly possible, you should rework them to keep your system logical. By the way, the automatic change cannot be undone after the update.
The new features are explained in more detail in a separate blog post.
Dashboards: automatic sections
For dashboards, there is now a section that automatically inserts suitable cards. You no longer have to insert new lights by hand: Home Assistant can now do that itself.
You can add a so-called «automatic section» to an existing dashboard by clicking on the plus symbol next to the last existing section. Then you have to choose between three variants:
- Frequently used controls: fills the section with functions you use often
- Device: shows all entities of a selected device
- Entities: shows all objects of a selected group, such as all devices in a room
If, like me (and hopefully every sensible person), you have an automation that reminds you to empty the litter box regularly, you can now have this displayed as a «Warning» badge on the dashboard. The background color of the badge can be adjusted, and it can even pulse noticeably.
Other major changes
In the activity overview, there is now a new filter «Triggered by». There, you can select people, but also automations. In the activity display, you then see not what happened in the specified period, but why. This helps to get to the bottom of inexplicable device behavior.
LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a radio standard for energy-saving sensors with a long transmission range. Unlike Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, it can also transmit over hundreds of meters. Such sensors are suitable for things like garden sheds, agricultural areas, or weather stations.
Previously, Home Assistant did not natively support the standard and could only be integrated via detours. Now, LoRaWAN network servers like ChirpStack and The Things Network (TTN) can be integrated directly into Home Assistant. You can find the central overview under Settings -> Connectivity -> LoRaWAN.
Cameras with the Matter 1.5 standard are now also supported. This allows you to bring their live stream into the dashboard via WebRTC. A new preview feature is two-way audio: the camera live stream gets a talk button, and you can speak to the person in front of the camera, provided they and their integration support two-way audio. You activate the function under Settings -> System -> Labs.
You can read many, many more changes of the update and details about the presented features in the developer blog. These include, for example, the ability to store backups and media on external local storage as well as support for Zigbee switches that work without power («Zigbee Green Power»).
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