Home Assistant 2026.4: infrared, automation, and Matter take a real leap forward

Home Assistant kicks off spring with an update that doesn’t just add a couple of handy options. The 2026.4 version, released on April 1, 2026, brings several significant improvements: native support for infrared, a new generation of triggers and conditions that are much more natural, better management of Matter locks, some well-considered tweaks on the dashboard side, and 14 new integrations. In short, it’s a version that simplifies daily life while opening up new very concrete usages.

An update that finally speaks the language of the home

What stands out in Home Assistant 2026.4 is not just the list of new features. It’s the direction taken. The team continues to smooth out technical complexity to bring the tool closer to how we really think about our living space. We don’t reason in “binary_sensor,” “cover,” or “state class.” We think “open door,” “detected presence,” “temperature too high,” “shutter closed.” And that’s exactly the logic that this version pushes much further.

For everyday users, the gain is obvious: less friction to create automations. For home automation enthusiasts, it’s also great news because this simplification does not remove power. It just makes it more usable. <h2>

Infrared becomes a real citizen of Home Assistant

This is undoubtedly the most significant new feature of this release. Home Assistant introduces native support for infrared through a new dedicated integration. The idea is simple but quite clever: to use small ESPHome devices equipped with an IR transmitter as “infrared proxies,” exactly in the spirit of what Home Assistant has already managed to do with Bluetooth proxies.

Concretely, this allows Home Assistant to control all these devices that have never been “smart” but still have an infrared receiver: televisions, air conditioners, fans, sound bars, hi-fi systems, and quite a few other devices that still linger in our living rooms. The first official example highlighted is the LG Infrared integration, which allows control of LG televisions with management of power, volume, channels, playback, and standard remote control buttons. The state remains “assumed,” as IR is inherently unidirectional, but for everyday use, Home Assistant indicates that it already works very well.

This is a more significant innovation than it appears. First, because it allows giving a second life to perfectly functional devices. Secondly, because it opens up an enormous playground for home automation scenarios. An old air conditioner can finally be integrated into an intelligent logic based on temperature, time, or presence. A television can automatically turn on during a movie scene. A standing fan can be controlled from a simple heat or occupancy sensor. We’re right in the DNA of Home Assistant: making intelligent what wasn’t without forcing replacement.

The team actually recommends starting with a Seeed Studio XIAO IR Mate at $9, flashable directly from the browser via ready-to-use ESPHome projects. This is typically the kind of addition that will interest tinkerers… but also anyone who wants to automate a park of existing devices on a budget.

Automations become much more natural

Another significant piece of this version: the evolution of “purpose-specific” triggers and conditions, offered via Home Assistant Labs. Home Assistant has been working on this since the end of 2025, but the 2026.4 version adds the largest batch of improvements to date, with the arrival of inter-domain triggers and conditions.

Until now, creating an automation often required knowing the exact nature of the concerned entity. A door could be seen as a binary sensor, a cover, or something else depending on the hardware and integration used. The same goes for temperature, humidity, or presence. This technical layer was powerful but not always pleasant to handle. Home Assistant corrects this by now organizing automations according to their real meaning in the house.

Now, you can trigger an automation on the opening or closing of a door, window, gate, or garage door, regardless of the type of entity used behind. The same logic applies for motion, occupancy, temperature, humidity, brightness, power, battery level, air quality, or certain aspects of the climate. In other words, the interface finally starts to speak like an installer, a user, or an occupant of the house, rather than like a developer who knows every domain by heart.

Even better: these new triggers and conditions support targeting by zone, floor, or label. This touches upon something very practical. It becomes possible to build automations like “when a window on the floor opens” or “if motion is detected outside” without having to select each corresponding entity one by one. If a new sensor is added later to the right zone, it automatically falls within the perimeter. It’s clean, scalable, and much easier to maintain.

In real life, the use cases are numerous. An alert can trigger if a window is open while the heating is on. A lighting scenario can activate if presence is detected in a dimly lit area. An air conditioning unit can be turned off as soon as a French door remains open too long. And for houses that are starting to accumulate sensors, this abstraction will avoid a lot of unnecessarily complicated YAML.

Even more triggers and conditions in existing domains

Home Assistant has not stopped at inter-domain triggers. The update also adds new possibilities to already existing domains. Counters gain triggers on increment, decrement, reset, or reaching minimum and maximum. Covers are enhanced to better manage all types of shutters, blinds, curtains, or awnings. Event entities receive a generic trigger, scheduled times gain conditions, selections and text fields become more coherent in the automation editor, and the water heater also recovers new triggers and conditions, particularly around mode changes.

This might not be the most “spectacular” part on paper, but for those building real advanced scenarios, these little refinements are precisely what changes the game. Less tinkering, fewer diverted templates, fewer contortions in the visual editor.

Matter locks become much more interesting

Home Assistant 2026.4 adds a manager for Matter locks. From the device page, a new screen allows direct management of users and their PIN codes. It is possible to add a user, set their code, and then choose between full access or one-time access, the latter being automatically deleted after use according to the behavior of the lock.

This is a very concrete addition. Until now, many users were waiting for Matter to become more than just a basic protocol of “it opens, it closes.” With this native management of codes, Home Assistant takes another step towards a real centralized management of access. For a vacation rental, an office, a technical room, or even the family home, this opens very practical scenarios: temporary code for a craftsman, one-time access for a delivery, code reserved for a neighbor during holidays, or even cleaner nominative assignments to track who uses what.

It’s also clear that the Matter ecosystem continues to slowly gain maturity. It’s not yet the perfect promise sold everywhere a few years ago, but this kind of function shows that integration is finally becoming useful in daily life.

More readable and prettier dashboards

On the interface side, Home Assistant adds a simple but frankly welcome function: the background color of dashboard sections. Each section can now receive a colored background, with opacity management. This allows for visually grouping related cards, highlighting an important area, or simply adding a bit of personality to a dashboard that can sometimes be very functional… and sometimes a bit austere, let’s say.

In a slightly advanced installation, the interest is immediate. You can distinguish the energy part, security, heating, outdoor areas, or the pool at a glance. For installers creating client interfaces, it’s also a good way to improve readability without having to revert to exotic custom cards.

The gauge also gets a visual redesign. Home Assistant speaks of a design that is more modern and coherent with the rest of the dashboard. This isn’t a graphic revolution, but everything is going in the right direction: fewer visual breaks, a more homogeneous interface, and, let’s face it, a more pleasant experience for daily use.

The 2026.4 version also brings automatic height management for certain cards, helping to balance dashboards without spending too much time adjusting the layout manually. And a favorites system makes its appearance on dashboard cards, allowing for easier access to the most used elements.

Assist and AI become a little less opaque

Among the more discreet but interesting new features, Home Assistant now allows you to see what “thinks” when an AI request is being processed. The goal is not to turn the assistant into a chatty chatbot but rather to make its operation more transparent during the analysis of a request.

This is the kind of detail that might seem anecdotal, yet it addresses a real need. When a voice assistant or an AI module takes a few seconds to respond, the user never really knows if it’s thinking, if it has crashed, or if it hasn’t understood anything. This visual feedback improves the perception of fluidity and reassures about the ongoing processing.

A host of ancillary improvements, but useful in daily life

Home Assistant 2026.4 is not limited to these three or four star features. The update also adds voice support for zone cleaning for vacuums, a feature introduced in the previous version’s interface. You can now ask the assistant to clean a specific room by voice. Backups now show a detailed upload progress depending on the destination, with support for Home Assistant Cloud, WebDAV, Google Drive, OneDrive, and several S3 compatible storages. The Markdown card becomes interactive with click actions, double-click, or long press. The visual editor for the Map card exposes more options without having to revert back to YAML. Finally, a new template function, state_attr_translated, allows recovery of translated attributes, for instance for the modes of a fan or an air conditioner.

These are exactly the small improvements that don’t always make the headlines but make an installation more pleasant, cleaner, and easier to evolve.

What new integrations are in Home Assistant 2026.4?

The release brings 14 new integrations. Among them, we find for example Autoskope for GPS tracking of vehicles and assets, UniFi Access for local control of doors, readers, and Ubiquiti access, as well as WiiM to control audio streamers like the WiiM Pro or the WiiM Amp with automatic discovery via Zeroconf.

Existing integrations are also evolving. SmartThings benefits from a big wave of improvements, particularly for robot vacuums, dishwashers, and some household appliances. Roborock gains support for the Q10. OpenAI Conversation adds support for GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4-pro with reasoning level options. SwitchBot recovers support for the Keypad Vision and the Standing Fan via the cloud depending on the products. Govee BLE adds a CO2 monitor, Jellyfin gains new playback controls, GitHub adds a merged pull request sensor, and Proxmox VE gets even stronger with more sensors, entity discovery, and actions.

For a modern home automation installation, this is an interesting signal: Home Assistant continues to expand its local and cloud coverage while strengthening highly present integrations among advanced users.

A change in philosophy on entity naming

One point to highlight also concerns the coherence of entity naming. The 2026.4 version further standardizes how entity names display with the context of the device. The goal is to allow Home Assistant to intelligently recombine the correct name based on where you are in the interface, rather than pushing users to manually include all context in each name. An automatic migration is planned to avoid duplicates, and old names can be kept as voice aliases to preserve compatibility with Assist.

This is typically a change that will divide perfectionists for two minutes… then save everyone time in the long run. When a platform grows, the consistency of display becomes almost as important as the functions themselves.

A few points of caution before updating

As always, this version also brings some incompatible changes to watch out for. The JVC Projector integration migrates some entities from the sensor domain to the select domain, which may require updating concerned automations, scripts, dashboards, and templates. For Litter-Robot, which we tested a few days ago, an old switch linked to night lighting has been removed after being replaced by a select-type entity in a previous version. Motion Blinds also changes the behavior of certain tilt commands on devices that do not report their tilt position.

Nothing dramatic here, but on a highly customized installation, it’s better to read the compatibility notes before clicking “update.” This is even more true if you have old automations, homemade scripts, or dashboards that rely on historical entities. <h2>

Should you install Home Assistant 2026.4?

Yes, clearly. Home Assistant 2026.4 is not just a minor routine update. It’s a version that enhances both the platform’s openness, with infrared, the simplicity of creating automations, with inter-domain triggers, and the maturity of the modern ecosystem, with Matter locks and several interface refinements.

The strongest point, in my opinion, is the shift in ergonomics of automations. Home Assistant remains an extremely powerful tool, but it is becoming less and less reserved for those who think “like the database.” And that’s very good news. The other excellent surprise is infrared. One might think it’s a technology of the past, while it becomes here a very clever bridge between the old world and today’s connected home. And honestly, bringing an old television or a slightly outdated air conditioner into your Home Assistant scenarios for a few euros… is anything but gimmicky.

If you use Home Assistant daily, this version clearly deserves your attention. Not only for the visible new features but because it makes the platform more logical, more flexible, and even a bit more enjoyable to live with.