Home Assistant’s 2026.9 release, “There’s room on this bus,” landed on September 2, 2026, and it is all about giving you better visibility into what your smart home is doing and why. The update focuses on everyday use: a proper network map for Matter, Activity entries that finally explain what triggered an action, a more useful Security dashboard, better chart navigation, and 13 new integrations. A small patch, 2026.9.1, followed on September 5, 2026, but the big changes are all in the main release.
Matter finally gets a real network map
The biggest visual change is a new network map for Matter devices, something users have had for Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Bluetooth for a while. The Matter panel now has a “Show map” button that opens a graph of how your Matter devices connect, using the same style of map those other protocols use. Instead of guessing which devices are talking over which path, you can see at a glance how the network is laid out.
The map shows which Matter devices use Thread and which use Wi‑Fi, and it marks which ones act as routers or border routers. That makes it much easier to understand how your smart home traffic moves around your house and which devices are carrying more of the load. If you are trying to fix flaky behavior or plan where to add more gear, having Matter in the same mapping view as your other radios pulls it into the same mental model as the rest of your network.
Before this change, Matter’s connection graph lived off to the side in the Matter Server’s own separate web interface, which many people never opened. Bringing that map straight into Home Assistant means you no longer have to jump between tools just to see how your devices connect. The overall experience is now much more consistent: Zigbee, Z‑Wave, Bluetooth, and Matter all share the same graph-style visual layout inside the main interface.
Activity now explains why something changed
The Activity view has always been good at telling you what changed, but not why it happened. Until now, if a light turned on or a door unlocked at a strange time, you would have to guess which automation did it, open that automation, dig into its trace, and work backward. The new Activity details dialog removes most of that guesswork.
Selecting any row in Activity now opens a details dialog that lays out the full story from top to bottom. It starts with what kicked everything off: that might be a person, a state change, a schedule, an integration, or even a Home Assistant restart. From there it lists which automations or scripts the event passed through, and it ends with the final entity change, such as the light turning on or the door locking.
This structure turns Activity into more than just a log; it becomes a readable chain of cause and effect. If a motion sensor triggers a hallway light, you can see that chain directly, instead of having to mentally stitch together several pieces. For anyone with a lot of automations, this change makes it much easier to track down surprises and to understand how different parts of the system interact.
Security dashboard gets active alerts and favorites
The Security dashboard gains two new sections aimed at surfacing the things you care about most without clutter. Both are managed from the same editor so you can tune them to match your home. The new Active alerts section only appears when something actually needs attention, which keeps the dashboard calm when everything is fine.
You can pick which entities are allowed to trigger Active alerts and give each one a severity level, either an Alert or a Warning. That lets you treat a smoke detector going off very differently from a window accidentally left open. Real problems get the stronger visual treatment, while lower-priority issues can stay less dramatic, and when nothing is wrong the whole section stays hidden.
Right next to that, a new Favorites section lets you pin the entities you check most often. This might be specific doors, locks, or sensors you watch every day. Those favorites sit at the top of the Security dashboard so you do not have to scroll around to see if your main entry door is locked or a particular sensor is clear. The idea came from a community-designed concept by contributor @ricardoantoniocm, and it gives the Security dashboard a more personal feel.
Charts you can read by keyboard and sound
Charts in Home Assistant used to be static images, which meant they were invisible to screen readers and could not be reached by keyboard at all. This release turns charts into real interactive elements that you can focus and move through using the keyboard. When a chart is focused, the arrow keys step through each data point one by one.
As you move, a live region announces the time and value of the current point so screen readers can read the data out loud. Pressing H at any time shows a list of all the keyboard shortcuts, styled to match your theme so it feels like part of the normal interface. This makes trends and history data much more accessible to people who rely on keyboard navigation.
Home Assistant also adds sound to charts. Each data point plays a short tone, rising or falling with the data, so you can literally hear the shape of a trend. The tones play for anyone navigating a chart with the keyboard, not just for screen reader users. These changes work with line and bar charts, including the device breakdown on the Energy dashboard, which is one of the most data-heavy parts of the system.
Smarter Modbus support, Tile card upgrades, and better sun automations
For homes that use Modbus devices such as solar inverters, energy meters, or heat pumps, this release starts a shift away from every user hand-writing their own register maps. The older, YAML-based Modbus integration still works and is not being removed, but Home Assistant now lays the groundwork for integrations that already know how a given device talks over Modbus. With those, you pick your device in the user interface like any other integration, and they share a single connection instead of fighting over it.
The first integrations built with this new approach are Fronius, Sofar Inverter Modbus, and Flexit. Fronius gains optional Modbus TCP / SunSpec support, which adds per-string solar data such as current, voltage, power, and lifetime energy for each MPP tracker, data that the existing local HTTP API does not expose. This kind of detailed insight can matter if you are trying to understand how each part of your solar array is performing without building your own register maps.
The Tile card also picks up three quality-of-life upgrades from contributor @pcan08. Lights now have a Light effect feature in the tile, so you can pick and preview things like a Rainbow effect directly from the main card instead of going into a separate view. Vacuums gain a Vacuum fan speed feature that lets you switch between min, medium, high, or max speeds alongside the usual start, stop, and dock commands.
Humidity control gets more flexible too. The existing Target humidity feature, which used to work only with humidifiers, now also supports climate entities that can control humidity. It uses the step size reported by the device instead of a fixed one, so the controls match what the hardware actually supports. A separate fix ensures that when the Tile card’s Feature position is set to Inline, all features show correctly; before, only the first feature appeared and the rest were silently dropped.
On the automation side, the Sun integration expands again. It now has four new conditions and eight matching triggers for golden hour, blue hour, midnight sun, and polar night. Golden hour and blue hour cover the warm and cool lighting around sunrise and sunset, which can be handy for matching indoor lighting to outdoor mood or closing blinds before harsh sun shines into a room. Each of these can be limited to morning, evening, or either, building on earlier work in 2026.7 and 2026.8 that added more detailed sun triggers, conditions, and time-based offsets.
Cloud voice, storage tools, 13 new integrations, and removals
On the cloud side, Nabu Casa is testing a new voice processing speech‑to‑text engine aimed at the three places voice processing most often trips up: accents, background noise, and non-English languages. Home Assistant Cloud subscribers can switch it on now under Settings, System, Labs, and Home Assistant cautions that it may not turn out to be a permanent addition. There are also changes that pass through the real IP address behind a login attempt, rather than showing every attempt as a local request, plus a streamlined signup flow to reduce friction when getting started. These updates are all about making voice control more reliable and making it easier to understand what is happening with your cloud connection.
There are some practical system tools too. New dedicated Serial and MQTT settings panels give these frequently used options their own home, which should cut down on hunting through menus. The release also adds network storage usage monitoring with capacity indicators so you can keep an eye on how much space is left on network-attached storage before it becomes a problem.
For device support, there are exactly 13 new integrations: Besen, Collection image, Flow‑it, Hot Spring, ISEO Argo BLE, LibreNMS, NexBlue, Ridder HortiMaX Pro, Samsung TV via ExLink, Silla Prism, Sofar Inverter Modbus, Specialized Turbo, and Tonewinner. On top of those, 15 new virtual integrations appear as stubs handled by existing integrations to help users find the right setup path: Ariston, Beverly, Bugu, Carrier, Colmo, Comfee, Inventor, Little Swan, Netsu, Olimpia Splendid, Pro Breeze, Rotenso, Toshiba Lifestyle, Vandelo, and Wahin. VLC support is removed because it required direct access to the system’s audio hardware, which only worked on the deprecated Home Assistant Core installation method, while the separate VLC via Telnet integration remains available.
Several backward-incompatible changes also land in this release. Flexit’s Nordic fireplace mode switch is removed, KNX exposes no longer send the first value automatically, and LLM API tool names now use domain‑prefixed names. The Persistent Notification update trigger type has changed, UniFi Protect smart detection switches are no longer hidden while recording is disabled, and the integration as a whole now requires UniFi Protect 7.2.105 or later, update installs and skips are now restricted to admin users, the deprecated Vacuum battery_level property is removed, and Z‑Wave JS lock user management actions now require admin access. For many users the most visible differences will be the new Matter network map, the clearer Activity timeline, and the refreshed Security and chart experiences, all aimed at making your smart home easier to understand and control day to day.
View the original press release.
