Home Assistant 2026.11 went out on November 4, tagged “2026.11.0” on GitHub and titled “A lot in store!” by Frenck in the release announcement. This Home Assistant November update lists 38 new integrations and roughly 5,827 pull requests from 557 contributors for the cycle, a reminder of how much of this project’s pace still comes from volunteers rather than a product team working to a release schedule.
The headline change most people will notice first has nothing to do with new hardware support. It is how entities get their names.
Entities finally get sensible names by default
Up to now, a card without a custom name usually showed just the entity name: “Temperature,” “Battery,” “Motion,” which gets confusing fast once you have a dozen of each scattered across the house. 2026.11 changes the default. Cards without a manually set name now show the device name and the entity name together, so you get “Living Room Thermostat Temperature” instead of a bare “Temperature.”
Home Assistant calls this “Name it once, Home Assistant adds the context,” and it is explicitly flagged as a breaking change. Dashboards will look different after the update even if you never touch a config file. The entity IDs themselves do not change, so automations and scripts referencing them should keep working; it is the display layer that shifts. If you have dashboards tuned around short names, expect some to need a second look after updating.
Automations can now exclude things from a target
Automation targets (areas, devices, entities, floors, labels) could previously only be built by adding things in. 2026.11 adds the option to exclude items from a target as well, in triggers, conditions and actions alike. Practically, that means you can say “every light in the house except the ones in the nursery” without having to hand-pick every other room, which was the usual workaround before this existed.
Dashboards get two new automatic sections
Automatic dashboard sections already existed for “Common controls.” This release adds two more: “Device” and “Entities.” Both fill themselves in based on what you point them at, rather than requiring you to lay out every card by hand, useful for anyone who has given up on hand-crafted dashboards for every room and just wants something reasonable without the afternoon of YAML.
Troubleshooting gets real attention
This is the part of the release I think matters most for day-to-day use, even though it will not show up in any screenshot roundup. Home Assistant has added tools aimed squarely at the “why did that happen?” moment: you can now see what triggered a given automation, follow a trace into a script that automation called, pull live logs scoped to a single integration, and zoom into history graphs instead of squinting at a tiny chart. None of this is glamorous, but anyone who has spent twenty minutes reconstructing why a light turned on at 3am will recognize the gap this closes.
Matter cameras, plus an experimental talk-back feature
Matter camera support lands in this release, and alongside it, tucked into the Labs section as an experimental feature, is two-way audio through supported cameras: talk back through the camera’s speaker, not just view its feed. Being in Labs means it is opt-in and still being worked on, so treat it as early rather than something to build a security routine around just yet.
Smaller additions worth knowing about
A handful of other changes round out the release:
- Backups and media can now be stored on local disks, an option that was not available before.
- LoRaWAN support has been added, along with batteryless Zigbee Green Power switches, the kind that harvest energy from the button press itself.
- The Alert card can now be configured through a visual editor instead of requiring YAML.
- Light tiles get direct color control.
- There is a new Date card.
- Dashboard sections can be copied and pasted, which should save some repetitive setup work for anyone managing several similar rooms.
HACS is now the Marketplace, as previously announced
We covered this in detail on November 2, when Frenck’s announcement first confirmed it, so we will not re-tread the whole thing here. Short version: HACS is now built into Home Assistant under Settings > Marketplace, available on every installation type, and the separate classic HACS installer no longer works starting with this release. If you were still on the old installer, 2026.11 is the version where that stops being an option.
Worth repeating since it is easy to skim past: Marketplace content is community-made and is not tested, audited or supported by the Home Assistant project itself. Installing or updating anything from it requires accepting an explicit warning to that effect. Custom repositories still need a GitHub device sign-in, which only reads public account information. Community download mirrors, including a mirror serving users in China, go through third-party operators rather than Home Assistant’s own infrastructure, and the project is upfront that it cannot vouch for what happens on someone else’s server.
Getting it
2026.11.0 is tagged as the latest stable release on the Home Assistant GitHub releases page, and the full write-up, including the complete list of new integrations, is in the official November 2026.11 blog post. If you are running Home Assistant, the usual update path through Settings applies. As always, it’s worth reading your specific integrations’ release notes before updating anything tied to automations you actually depend on. For background on the platform itself, see our Home Assistant app page.