Home Assistant 2025.12 clearly wraps up the year beautifully. With the new Labs mode, “smart” triggers for automations, and an Energy dashboard that finally updates in real time, this version touches everything that is at the heart of a modern home automation setup.
Home Assistant 2025.12: an end-of-year update very focused on usage
December is rarely a minor update for Home Assistant, and 2025.12 confirms this tradition. The team brings several components that will directly impact daily life: a “Labs” space to test features early, triggers and conditions that are much more natural in the automation editor, better-managed dashboards at the system level, and an Energy dashboard that can now display real-time power consumption as well as detailed water usage.
For an individual, this means simpler automations to create and a clearer view of what consumes energy at home. For an electrician or integrator, it primarily means faster commissioning, more readable interfaces for clients, and more precise diagnostic tools, especially regarding energy and AI.
Home Assistant Labs: an official sandbox for new features
The big news of 2025.12 is the creation of “Home Assistant Labs”. In practical terms, Labs appears as a new menu under Settings > System > Labs, where you can enable features “in preview”.
The idea is interesting: these are not hacked or unstable features, but complete, tested modules that the team wants to confront with real-world use before making them official. You activate them, try them out, give your feedback, and they will evolve – or disappear – based on what the community reports.
A reassuring point for the more cautious (and particularly for professionals managing multiple client sites): with each activation of a Labs module, Home Assistant offers to create an automatic backup. If a behavior isn’t suitable, you simply disable the feature, without even needing to restart.
Winter mode: make it snow on your dashboards
To inaugurate Labs, developers have indulged themselves with a Winter mode inspired directly by a community project. Once activated, snow falls on your dashboards, transforming the interface into a true Christmas decor.
For an end user, this is purely cosmetic, but this kind of detail makes the interface feel more “alive” and encourages opening the application, especially on wall-mounted tablets in the living room.
Business-specific triggers and conditions: automation finally speaks like you
The other major piece, much more structural, is the “purpose-specific triggers and conditions,” also available through Labs. Until now, creating an automation through the graphical interface often felt like juggling with states and numeric comparators. Now, Home Assistant offers triggers and conditions designed in terms of use, directly provided by domains like Light, Climate, or Fan.
In practice, instead of reasoning “if the state of light.living_room changes from off to on,” you simply choose “When a light turns on.” Instead of decoding a thermostat state, you choose “If heating is in heating mode.” This aligns much better with how we actually think.
Another important change: everything is built around the target. You start by selecting an area, a floor, a label, or a device, then Home Assistant suggests the types of triggers and conditions that fit. For example, you can trigger an automation “when a light on the upstairs floor turns on,” without worrying about the exact list of lights and without having to maintain a group manually.
This greatly simplifies everyday scenarios, from “if a window is open then turn off the heating” to “turn off all the lights on the ground floor when everyone leaves.”
Dashboards: a global default dashboard, better-organized areas
On the interface side, Home Assistant 2025.12 continues the significant work that has been done over several versions on dashboards. The choice of the default dashboard now occurs at the system level: you define a main dashboard that instantly applies to all users of the instance, at the top of the sidebar.
However, each user still has the option to enforce their preferred dashboard in their profile. You can thus imagine a very simplified dashboard for children, another more complete for parents, while maintaining a coherent “default” behavior. For wall-mounted tablets, the ideal remains to create a dedicated user with a specific dashboard for that usage.
Another highly requested improvement: the ability to rearrange the order of areas and floors in the integrated dashboards (Home, Lights, Security, etc.). You can now go to Settings > Areas, labels, and locations and simply drag and drop to reorder the rooms and levels logically for the actual home. Changes automatically reflect on all dashboards using these elements.
Finally, the “Home” dashboard gains a new sidebar of shortcuts and a more efficient layout, while officially becoming a fully integrated dashboard. The dashboard editor also benefits from an undo/redo feature (up to 75 steps), which has already appeared in the automation editor, allowing for easy modifications without cold sweats in case of a false move.
Energy and water: real-time power and “downstream” meters
The Energy dashboard, already widely used to track consumed and produced kWh, takes a new step with the introduction of real-time power monitoring. Until now, we mainly worked with aggregated data. Now, we can configure power sensors in addition to energy sensors to see in real time the power drawn from the grid, that fed back to the grid, or the instantaneous solar production. New power graphs appear to visualize these variations throughout the day.
For a house equipped with TIC-type meters, Shelly EM, DIN rail modules, or inverter gateways, this becomes a fantastic educational tool: turning on the oven, starting the dryer, or starting the charging station and immediately seeing the impact on the power curve. This approach is likely to render many custom dashboards we cobbled together for that “live” view obsolete.
On the water side, Home Assistant introduces the notion of “downstream” meters. In addition to the main meter, it is now possible to declare sub-meters for garden irrigation, the pool, a water softener, or any other specific use. The water dashboard then displays a sankey-type chart that allocates consumption by use, similar to energy.
Once again, for an installer, this is a very interesting component: with a few well-placed flow meters, it becomes possible to offer a client a very clear view of where the water from the house goes, allowing for a quick assessment of the benefits of optimizing certain usages.
Finally, to accommodate this new data, the Energy dashboard adopts a tabbed interface. If you only track energy, nothing changes. But as soon as you also activate water, gas, or power, the dashboard splits into dedicated sections, which are more readable.
Integrations: new services, Shelly at the “platinum” level and more
As always, the “Integrations” section of this release is well stocked. We find new connectors like Essent for dynamic electricity and gas pricing in the Netherlands, Google Air Quality for real-time air quality, and Google Weather for complete weather data (current conditions, hourly and daily forecasts).
Existing integrations are not left out. The team highlights several notable improvements and, above all, advancements in the quality scale of integrations. Shelly, for example, has now reached the “platinum” level, confirming the maturity of the integration and its reliability for intensive use in residential or commercial environments.
For a professional who needs to select reliable hardware components, these quality levels are invaluable: they provide an objective indicator of long-term support, offline behavior, or even exception management. In other words, they help avoid nasty surprises for a client several months after installation.
AI and mobile: better understanding of responses, better exposure of entities
The “Other noteworthy changes” section brings two small enhancements worth noting. First, for those using AI and voice assistants, the debug panel has been improved. You can now inspect the system prompt sent to the model and the tool calls made to generate the response. You can thus see plainly why the AI ignored a particular entity or chose a specific action.
Next, the Companion app for Android gains a deeper integration with Home Assistant. From the “more info” window of an entity, it is now possible to directly add this entity as a widget on the home screen or an Android Auto favorite, without diving into the app’s configuration menus.
In practice, this means, for example, that after creating a smart heating automation, you can easily expose the main thermostat as a widget on the homeowner’s smartphone, or place the gate’s door as a favorite in Android Auto for immediate access upon arriving home.
What 2025.12 concretely changes for your setup
In summary, Home Assistant 2025.12 is not a flashy release that shakes everything up, but a set of very concrete components that make the platform more pleasant, more intuitive, and more communicative for end users. Labs opens a clear channel between the development team and the community, offering ready-to-use functions that are still “under discussion.” The new triggers and conditions will clearly lower the complexity level for creating advanced scenarios while remaining compatible with existing setups.
Dashboards become more coherent at the system level, easier to organize, and less stressful to modify thanks to the undo/redo functionality. And the Energy dashboard, by updating in real time and integrating detailed water usage, becomes a genuine audit tool for the home, both to optimize the bill and to explain to occupants what is behind the curves.
For an individual still hesitant to upgrade, the answer is simple: if your setup is up to date with the previous 2025.x versions, 2025.12 brings very concrete improvements without jeopardizing your existing scenarios. For an installer, it’s especially a good time to look at Labs and the new Energy dashboard to prepare new monitoring and client support offers around “smart” automations.
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