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Home Assistant 2026.9 has arrived for the new school year. And this time, no spectacular features that make you want to redo your entire dashboard in the evening. Instead, the team has tackled a series of small tweaks that can quickly annoy us in everyday life.
Why did this lamp turn on by itself at 3 a.m.? Which USB dongle corresponds to Zigbee? Is my Matter network properly meshed? Is it really the right time to restart Home Assistant when an automation might be running?
Questions I have already asked about my own installation. And with Home Assistant 2026.9, some answers become much easier to find.
There’s also something new on the Modbus side. The name may be less enticing than Matter, but for anyone interested in photovoltaics, heat pumps, or energy management, it is probably one of the most interesting topics in this version.
Let’s see what this new school year has in store for us.
But why did this light turn on by itself?
This is the kind of situation that those who have a few dozen automations know well.
A light turns on when it shouldn’t. A shutter closes at a strange hour. A socket just turned off for no apparent reason. We open the history: indeed, the shutter closed at 10:17 p.m. Thanks, Home Assistant, but I had noticed that ;-) Now it remains to understand why.
Until now, it often required some fishing through the automations and checking their traces. With Home Assistant 2026.9, the activity provides more information about the origin of a change. By expanding an event, you can trace back the chain that led to the action. The shutter was closed by a specific automation, itself triggered by a specific event.
On a small installation, it’s comfortable. On an installation that has been running for years, with dozens of automations accumulated over time, the time savings can be enormous. I really like this development because it addresses a problem that inevitably arises when you push Home Assistant far enough: as you automate the house more, you sometimes end up not knowing who controls what!
Not everything is perfect yet. Some manual actions remain difficult to identify precisely. But we already have much more information than before to track down the clues.
Finding information in the history becomes less tedious
The History and Activity pages have also been revised.
A new “Sources” panel is used to filter what we want to display by floor, area, device, entity, domain, device class, or integration. Said like that, it seems quite trivial. Until the day your Home Assistant counts several hundred entities.
Do you only want to see the temperatures on the ground floor? The openings on the upper floor? All the devices related to a particular integration? A few clicks are enough. Home Assistant even remembers the selected filters when you return to the page.
The History and Activity do not function quite the same. In the History, you must select what you want to display before generating the graphs. Makes sense: on some installations, trying to simultaneously trace several hundred entities would quickly cause a mess.
The Activity always displays everything by default, then you refine if necessary.
The date selector has also been redesigned, and the sometimes long entity names are now displayed better.
These are small tweaks. But these small tweaks are often what we appreciate most after a few weeks of use.
The Security dashboard learns to focus on essentials
The Security dashboard gains two functions that I find quite well thought out: favorites and active alerts.
Favorites are used to keep certain equipment at the top of the screen. Typically the front door lock, the garage door, a few cameras, or the detectors that you check regularly.
Active alerts go a little further. You choose the important entities, and Home Assistant brings them up when they are in a state that deserves your attention. Two levels are provided: warning and alert. An opened window, for example, may appear as a warning. If the smoke detector goes off, then we clearly move to the next level. When everything is normal, the section disappears.
I like this philosophy. A security dashboard doesn’t need to show fifty sensors in the green all the time. What I’m primarily interested in is what’s wrong.
Matter finally gets its network map
With Zigbee or Z-Wave, we quickly get used to checking the representation of the mesh network to understand how the various devices communicate. Matter can now do the same.
Home Assistant 2026.9 displays the Matter network topology in the form of a map. It is especially interesting for Matter over Thread since you can see the devices and the Thread border routers present on the network. And that’s where it becomes very concrete.
Let’s take a Matter over Thread lock installed quite far in the house. It regularly loses connection. By looking at the map, we discover that it is a bit alone in its corner, far from the rest of the mesh. Adding or moving a Thread border router then becomes a rather obvious path.
Although Matter was designed to simplify the connected home, as soon as we mix Wi-Fi, Thread, and multiple border routers, understanding what’s going on under the hood is not always straightforward. This map should help a lot. You will simply need to use a sufficiently recent version of the Matter server to benefit from it.
Modbus finally becomes less daunting
Now we switch to a completely different register. Modbus is not the protocol people discuss over drinks to impress friends. It dates back to the 1970s, and its operation is nothing particularly sexy. Except that it is everywhere.
Photovoltaic inverters, electric meters, heat pumps, ventilation, air conditioning… as soon as you start connecting energy equipment or those from the professional world to Home Assistant, you inevitably cross Modbus sooner or later.
Home Assistant has been able to manage it for a long time. The problem is that its configuration often requires getting your hands dirty with YAML, knowing the Modbus registers of the device, their format, and sometimes tinkering with a few templates behind. Not exactly the most welcoming part of Home Assistant.
Version 2026.9 begins to change that. Integrations can now directly include the necessary information to communicate with a Modbus device. The idea is for the user to choose their device, and the integration already knows which registers it needs to query. Much cleaner.
Another interesting evolution: Home Assistant can share the same Modbus connection between several integrations. Imagine several devices connected on the same RS-485 bus. If each integration tries to manage its own connection on its own, troubles are never far away. Home Assistant can now serve as an intermediary and properly share this connection.
The first integrations are starting to use this new architecture. Fronius can particularly leverage Modbus TCP and SunSpec to retrieve more information directly from certain photovoltaic equipment.
This is probably the novelty I will follow most closely in future versions. Between photovoltaics, residential batteries, charging stations, and heat pumps, Home Assistant is becoming an increasingly interesting player in energy management for the home. And behind many of these devices, Modbus is still prevalent. If their integration ends up being almost as simple as adding a Zigbee socket, we will have made significant progress.
MQTT and serial ports stored in the same place
As Home Assistant manages new protocols, the technical tools have been a bit dispersed throughout the interface. Version 2026.9 starts to organize all that into a dedicated connectivity section.
MQTT has become much more accessible. Users of Zigbee2MQTT are already familiar with these tools: listening to a topic, publishing a message, checking the broker configuration… Before, you had to go into the MQTT integration and then find the right menu. Now, access is much more direct.
The same applies to serial ports. And having already had several USB dongles connected simultaneously on a Home Assistant machine, I can assure you that you quickly start wondering which corresponds to what. The new panel displays the detected serial ports and the integrations that use them. With a Zigbee stick, a Z-Wave controller, and an RS-485 adapter connected to the same machine, it’s far from unnecessary.
Tile cards continue to replace the old cards
Tile cards have evolved a lot in recent years, and I use them more and more in my own dashboards. Home Assistant 2026.9 adds three new commands to them.
For compatible lighting, we can now directly choose a light effect. This is particularly useful with WLED, where the list of effects can quickly become… endless. Fortunately, we can select only the ones we really use.
Robot vacuums gain direct control over suction power. Again, you can choose which levels to display.
Compatible Climate equipment can offer target humidity adjustment.
And there’s another small change that visually changes a lot: several functions can be placed on the same line within a Tile card. Dashboards can thus remain compact while giving access to more controls.
Home Assistant makes its graphs accessible to visually impaired people
This novelty will probably go unnoticed by many users. However, it deserves to be acknowledged. Home Assistant graphs can now be navigated with a keyboard and read by screen readers.
Until now, a graph was essentially a visual element. For a visually impaired person, accurately retrieving the data it contains was not straightforward. Different points can now be navigated using the keyboard.
Home Assistant goes even further with a sound system: the tone changes depending on whether the curve rises or falls. In other words, you can literally listen to the evolution of a graph.
I find the idea quite brilliant. It’s typically the kind of improvement that some users will never notice, while it can completely change the experience for others.
How much space is left on the NAS?
Home Assistant knows how to use a NAS or other network storage, particularly to send its backups there. Curiously, there was still a fairly basic piece of information missing: how much space is left? That’s corrected. Go to Settings > System > Storage. Home Assistant now displays the used space and available space on the configured network locations. This avoids opening the NAS interface just to check that a backup won’t fill the disk.
Not exactly newsworthy, of course. But I really like this kind of improvement.
Cards switch to OpenStreetMap vector data
The mapping system is also changing in Home Assistant 2026.9.
Home Assistant had been using raster tiles, in other words, small images assembled to form the map. The new version uses vector data from OpenStreetMap. The change was accelerated by an issue with the former map provider, but the team took the opportunity to overhaul the system.
The maps now remain sharp during zoom, and this technology offers more freedom for the future: themes, dark mode, different languages, or styles adapted to certain uses. The choice of OpenStreetMap aligns quite well with Home Assistant.
There’s even a nice little touch: if the path in front of your house doesn’t exist or is poorly documented, you can correct it in OpenStreetMap. Once the change is propagated, it will also appear in Home Assistant.
Home Assistant Cloud strengthens security
There is also change for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers.
Remote connections now correctly transmit their original IP address to Home Assistant.
Why is this interesting? Because some connections could previously appear as coming from 127.0.0.1, which is the Home Assistant machine itself. Not very practical when trying to ban an IP address after several incorrect connection attempts.
The banning mechanism can now work properly with connections passing through Home Assistant Cloud.
Home Assistant is also testing a new voice recognition engine provided by Soniox in Labs. It aims for better recognition of accents, noisy environments, and languages other than English. For us Francophones, it certainly deserves a little test. The feature remains experimental and must be activated in Settings > System > Labs.
Even more possibilities around the sun
Sun-related automations no longer limit to the classic sunrise/sunset. Home Assistant adds events related to golden hour, blue hour, and even polar sun.
The blue hour, for example, can be interesting for gradually triggering outdoor lighting instead of simply waiting for sunset.
I already use sunset and sunrise times a lot in my automations, especially for shutters. Having additional markers offers some interesting possibilities for more finely managing lighting according to natural light.
Home Assistant warns you before restarting at the wrong time
Here’s a situation that has happened to me before. We modify something, Home Assistant requests a restart, we click… and we later realize that a script or an automation was actually running. Home Assistant 2026.9 now checks this point.
When it’s time to restart, the confirmation window displays the automations and scripts that are still running. It’s up to you to decide whether to wait until they finish before restarting the system.
It’s just an extra line in a window. But it can prevent some pretty strange behaviors in the house.
And lots of small things everywhere
As often with Home Assistant updates, the complete changelog is much longer than the few highlighted new features.
The Energy dashboard, for example, displays device names more clearly. Handy when several curves are simply called “Energy,” which happens more often than we’d like.
Dashboards also gain a background adjustment directly from the interface. No need to go through YAML for this part anymore.
Templates accept more custom attributes. Some shutters can expose their speed. Multimedia search can query more compatible libraries.
Thirteen new integrations also appear with this version.
Users of Proxmox can even pause a virtual machine from Home Assistant. For a homelab, there are probably some fun scenarios to imagine. Why let some VMs run all day if no one needs them?
An update that makes Home Assistant easier to use
After reviewing all the new features in this version 2026.9, it’s ultimately the diagnostic improvements that stand out the most for me.
Home Assistant has become extremely powerful. For some of us, it now controls hundreds of entities, dozens of automations, and multiple protocols. And the more you add, the more a simple question becomes complicated: “Why did the house just do that?”
Being able to easily trace back the origin of an action will thus be much more useful to me than a new animation in a dashboard.
The same goes for the Matter map, the identification of serial ports, or the warning before a restart. These are tools that we don’t necessarily need every day. But the day something doesn’t work, we are very glad to have them.
I’m also keeping a close eye on Modbus. Home Assistant is increasingly interested in energy, and this protocol remains very present in photovoltaics, heating, and professional equipment. Making it more accessible could unlock a lot of possibilities in the coming months.
Home Assistant 2026.9 is thus a rather discreet update at first glance. After a few minutes of exploring it, it ultimately reveals itself full of small improvements that we are likely to adopt very quickly.
As usual, remember to check the breaking changes before clicking “Update”: a quick look at your integrations, and then a full backup of Home Assistant.
It takes five minutes. And the day an update goes wrong, those five minutes suddenly seem very well invested ;-)
