Home Assistant has released version 2026.3, which is a smaller update that focuses on cleaning up and improving features that are already in place. Rather than adding a lot of big new headline items, this release puts attention on bug fixes, new and updated integrations, and a few practical tools that make everyday use a bit smoother. It also lays some groundwork for future voice control features and tightens up parts of the interface that users spend a lot of time in, like automations and the Energy dashboard. Alongside the software release, the team is also pointing users to a new Open Home Foundation merch store and promoting the upcoming State of the Open Home 2026 event in Utrecht, which is planned for April 8.
One of the more visible changes is a new way to control robot vacuums. A “clean area” action is now available for supported vacuums, including models that connect through Matter, Ecovacs, and Roborock. This action lets you send a vacuum to one or more specific areas from inside Home Assistant, instead of only running full-house or vendor-defined zone cleaning. The system uses Home Assistant areas you already set up, not random IDs from the vacuum vendor. You map the segments that the vacuum detects to the areas defined in Home Assistant through the vacuum entity settings, under a section called “Map vacuum segments to areas.” If the vacuum’s internal map changes later, Home Assistant raises a repair issue so you can adjust the mapping. Because the mapping is tied to Home Assistant areas, this also sets the base for future voice control, like being able to ask a voice assistant to clean a named room once that feature is added.
The Energy dashboard gets several changes aimed at clearer use and better data at a glance. In the Now view, new badges show live power use, gas flow rate, and water flow rate, so you can see current consumption without looking through charts. Water now has its own Sankey chart in the Now view, giving a visual breakdown of where water is going in the home in the same style as the existing power chart. To avoid confusion between different kinds of consumption, the second tab of the Energy dashboard has been renamed from “Energy” to “Electricity,” since the overall dashboard covers electricity, gas, and water together. The configuration screen is now split into three tabs labeled Electricity, Gas, and Water, which organizes settings by resource type. The bar chart tooltips on the Energy dashboard now show the day of the week along with the date so that it is easier to see weekly patterns and match them to routines.
Automation editing gets a change that will matter to users who build more detailed workflows. The visual automation editor now exposes a “Continue on error” option directly in the user interface for each action. We’re loving this new option, and have hoped for it for a while now. Before this release, this behavior was only possible by editing YAML. The option sits in the three dots menu on an action row. When turned on, a marker appears on that action so it is clear which ones will ignore errors and let the automation keep running. This is useful when you have a chain of actions and do not want one failure to prevent the rest. For example, if you send several notifications in one automation and one target has an issue (like a Home Assistant satellite being unavailable), the others will still run instead of the whole automation stopping at the first error.
There is also early work around voice control on Android. The Home Assistant Companion app for Android now has experimental on-device wake word detection. This lets a user trigger Assist by voice from anywhere on the phone, even when the phone is locked. The detection runs on the device, which means it does not depend on cloud wake word services. This feature turns an Android phone into a kind of mobile voice endpoint for Home Assistant, which fits together with the broader push around local voice control in the project. We’re looking at trying this new feature on our Android tablet that acts as a wall panel. Because this is experimental, users should expect that it might change or improve over time as the developers gather feedback.
Behind these user-facing changes, the release also contains many new integrations, updates to existing ones, and a series of bug fixes, along with work to raise more integrations on the integration quality scale. The project notes that Home Assistant is now running on Python 3.14, which keeps the core platform current with the latest Python release. Overall, version 2026.3 is mainly about refinement, better control over common tasks, and preparing for future features, rather than changing how users work with Home Assistant in a big way.
View the original press release.
