Home Assistant’s next big release focuses on making your smart home easier to see, control and automate. The 2026.10 update brings a brand-new vector map, clearer automation tools, a cleaner profile page and a one-click way to plug your own AI tools into Home Assistant. The beta release notes stress that some features may change or be removed before the stable release, but they already give a good picture of what’s planned. A livestream release party is scheduled on YouTube for October 7 at 12:00 PT, when the stable version is set to go out.
A sharper, smarter map that stays local
The map in Home Assistant gets a complete rebuild, moving from static tiles to a vector map drawn on your device. That means streets and labels stay sharp at any zoom level and pan smoothly, instead of looking blocky when you zoom in too far. Older hardware like an aging wall tablet will fall back to the classic map, so you are not forced to upgrade devices just to see where people are.
Map tiles now come from the OpenStreetMap Foundation through a new Map tiles integration that sits inside Home Assistant. Your browser no longer talks to any third-party map provider directly, which cuts down on outside connections and surprises like “API key required” watermarks on map images. Recent tiles are cached, so if your internet blips out for a short time, the map can still load areas you viewed recently.
Markers on the map also get a redesign to make it easier to read at a glance. People now show up with their profile picture, zones get their own colored icons, and everyone inside the same zone is grouped into a single bubble so the map does not turn into a mess of overlapping circles. The Map dashboard gains People, Devices and Zones tabs, and picking a person shows a short history of where they have been, colored by zone. On phones, the map now takes over the whole screen for better use of space, and the zone editor uses the same new mapping system so you see exactly what you are adjusting.
Cleaner profile controls and smarter automations
The user profile page is getting a tidy new layout that puts related settings together. It is now split into Appearance, Localization, This browser (or This mobile app) and Security, so you are not hunting around for basic options. Every user now sees an Edit profile button to change their own name and profile picture, which used to be restricted to administrators.
Automations get a few quality-of-life upgrades that aim to cut down on YAML guessing and ID mistakes. The “Triggered by” condition can now be set by simply ticking which triggers you want it to match, instead of hand-writing trigger IDs in the editor. Home Assistant creates and cleans up those IDs on its own, while YAML-defined IDs still work for people who prefer to write automations by hand. If a condition points to a deleted trigger, the editor flags it, and it also offers a Fix action when it spots duplicate IDs.
The automation editor itself shows more detail directly in each row so you can understand a flow without digging into every step. Conditions and actions now display information like numeric thresholds (“above 10 °C”), durations, and sunrise or sunset offsets right in the list. That should make it easier to scan through a long blueprint or troubleshoot why something is not firing when you expect.
One-click AI connection and smarter music requests
Home Assistant is also trying to make AI tools easier to connect. The AI tasks page under Settings > System is renamed to just AI and now includes a Model Context Protocol card. From there, you can turn on the MCP server with a single click, and Home Assistant shows URLs you can paste straight into AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor so they can talk to your home system.
New setups restrict these AI connections to administrator accounts by default, adding a basic safety layer so not every user can hook external AI tools into the system. The release notes also mention a change to AI-driven music requests. When you ask AI to play music, it now gets a list of search results and picks the best match instead of always taking the first hit, which should cut down on wrong tracks starting to play.
Dashboards, alerts and a batch of smaller upgrades
Dashboard visibility rules are getting more powerful and more in line with automations. Card, badge and section visibility can now use the same types of conditions you see in the automation editor: Template, Sun, Zone and Device, and you can mix those with Screen and User conditions. The Visibility tab now shows whether a card is visible right now and whether each condition currently passes, which makes troubleshooting hidden cards much easier. Tile cards gain support for Timer actions, including start, pause and cancel, along with Timer presets so you can fire off common countdowns quickly.
The default Home dashboard itself gets smarter about surfacing urgent information. It will now show active alerts like a door left open or a smoke detector going off, the same alerts that previously appeared only on the Security dashboard. Device support gets several focused updates: a new glass break binary sensor class that is treated as a security sensor, already used by HomematicIP Cloud, SimpliSafe, Z-Wave and Hive; “therms” added as an energy unit for natural gas, matching how many US utilities bill it; and the Energy dashboard now listing each battery’s discharge separately so storage setups are easier to understand. Lawn mower entities gain a stop action and an idle state, and there is a new “Use device name” switch for entities to keep naming consistent. The login page also works better with password managers again, including Firefox’s built-in manager.
The beta also adds support for more local, infrared and niche devices. SolarEdge Modbus arrives as a local, cloud-free option and is launching at platinum quality, which is Home Assistant’s top quality tier. New Gree Infrared and OSRAM Infrared support lets you control devices through an infrared transmitter such as an ESPHome-based device. Messaging gets a boost through new Threema support, and there are new hooks for Vitesy Shelfy fridge air purifiers, Willow plant sensors and Sunsynk solar inverters.
Home Assistant is also dropping support for several services that no longer work. Melnor RainCloud support is going away because Melnor discontinued the original RainCloud WiFi Timer and its cloud service no longer responds. Zestimate support is removed after Zillow retired the API it depended on. Orange and Rockland Utility support is dropped, with customers pointed toward Opower instead, and SolarEdge Local is removed because SolarEdge disabled the local API it relied on, with the new SolarEdge Modbus integration offered as a local alternative.
How to get Home Assistant 2026.10
The stable 2026.10 update is scheduled to arrive on October 7 and should appear like any other release through the update notification under Settings. When you see the prompt, you can install it from there without needing to download anything manually. For people who want early access, you can switch your system to the beta channel to try new features before the stable launch.
The beta release notes recommend pairing a beta install with the #beta channel on the Home Assistant Discord, so you can compare notes with others and see known issues as they pop up. Bugs and regressions should be reported on GitHub so the team can address them before they roll out the stable build. The notes also list several backward-incompatible changes, such as usernames now always being handled in lowercase, so make a full backup of your setup before updating, whether you are on beta or waiting for the stable version.
View the original release notes.
