Home Assistant 2026.9 went stable on 2 September 2026 under the name “There’s room on this bus,” with the usual live release party. Most of the attention will go to the Security dashboard, which finally learned when to keep quiet. But there are also several breaking changes in here, and at least two of them will bite people who run the home assistant update without reading first.
Active alerts only show up when something needs you
The Security dashboard has a new Active alerts section. When nothing needs attention, it is not there at all.
You choose which entities can raise an alert and how serious each one counts as, picking between Alert and Warning severity. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A window left open should not get the same red treatment as a triggered smoke detector, and until now it more or less did.
Next to it sits a new Favorites section, for pinning the entities you actually check to the top of the dashboard. The idea started as a community proposal from @ricardoantoniocm and was adopted as a roadmap opportunity by the Open Home Foundation. Showing the same alerts on the Home dashboard is planned for a later release.
History and Activity share a new Sources panel
Both pages now share one Sources panel on the left. It merges target selection (floors, areas, devices, entities) with filtering by domain, device class and integration, so you can cut an entire area down to just its motion sensors.
The panel docks to the side and opens on its own when the screen is wide enough. On a narrow screen it collapses into a sliding sheet. Your filtering is remembered between visits.
The two pages still behave differently, and that is deliberate: History waits for a selection before it draws a graph, while Activity shows everything by default.
Two smaller fixes shipped alongside. The date range picker is now a single pill with previous and next arrows, and long entity names sit above their bar instead of getting cut off. Charts also got proper accessibility work: arrow keys step through data points, and a live region reads out the time and value for screen readers.
Modbus gets a modern foundation
Integrations can now share the same Modbus bus. One piece of hardware no longer belongs exclusively to one integration, which has been a long-standing annoyance for anyone running several Modbus devices off a single line.
Underneath sits a new standalone modbus-connection library, built on tmodbus, a modern fully typed Modbus library. Three new Modbus integrations come with it: Sofar Inverter Modbus, which detects the inverter model automatically and handles PV-only or hybrid battery setups, plus Fronius and Flexit. They are part of 13 new integrations in this release.
Matter map, Sun conditions, and a tidier Settings
There is a new Matter network map showing how Home Assistant connects to Thread border routers, the Wi-Fi access point and end devices.
The Sun integration adds four conditions and eight matching triggers for golden hour, blue hour, midnight sun and polar night. Each one can be restricted to the morning, the evening, or both.
Settings has a new Connectivity page that collects Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, KNX, MQTT, Thread, Bluetooth, Serial, Infrared, Radio frequency, Insteon and Tags behind a single entry. Existing links still work, and Voice assistants moves down to join them. This is a navigation change only: a setup running Zigbee2MQTT against a Mosquitto broker keeps working exactly as before, and only the place you click to reach the settings has moved.
Template entities also got custom attributes across a long list of entity types (alarm control panel, button, cover, device tracker, fan, image, light, lock, number, select, switch, update, weather), and the attributes option is now fully templatable. The Home Assistant Cloud sign-up flow was clarified as well.
Breaking changes to check first
VLC is gone from the Core
The VLC integration has been removed, with no replacement provided. It needed direct access to the system’s audio hardware, which only ever worked on the deprecated Home Assistant Core installation method.
Read the next part carefully, because it is easy to panic over the wrong thing. This does not affect VLC via Telnet, which is a separate integration and stays available on every installation method. If that is the one you use, nothing changes for you.
UniFi Protect needs 7.2.105 or newer
UniFi Protect now requires version 7.2.105 or higher. On anything older the integration stops setting up and shows a message telling you to update. One other UniFi Protect change: the smart detection switches (Detections: Person, Detections: Vehicle, and the audio alarm toggles) are no longer hidden when recording is disabled.
The rest
- The deprecated
battery_levelproperty is gone from the base vacuum entity. Core integrations migrated back in 2026.8, but a custom integration still relying on it will stop reporting battery level. Add a separate battery sensor. - Z-Wave JS lock user and credential management is now restricted to admin accounts.
- Installing or skipping an update is admin-only from now on.
- KNX exposes no longer send an entity’s first value to the KNX bus. That behaviour used to depend on timing.
Reading the full list
The official release announcement covers each change with screenshots, and the full changelog for core 2026.9 lists every commit, including the complete set of new integrations. If you are still weighing this platform against the alternatives, our openHAB page covers the main one.