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Home Assistant 2026.3

After last month's massive release, this one is a nice and relaxed one 🙂

The third release of 2026 puts the Home Assistant community in the spotlight. This month the developers focused mainly on reviewing and merging contributions from the wider community, which gives us a lot of new integrations, quality improvements to existing integrations, and bug fixes. Let's take a look at the most interesting parts.

Python 3.14

Home Assistant now runs on Python 3.14, bringing a faster interpreter, improved startup time, and better memory efficiency. For most users this change is invisible, but it will show up in the performance of your automations and integrations.

Area-Based Cleaning for Robot Vacuums​

If you have a robot vacuum integrated in Home Assistant, you probably know the issue: even when you carefully define areas in Home Assistant (kitchen, living room, bedroom), the vacuum uses its own segment names from the vendor app. You ended up working with two different maps of your home in your automations.

This release brings cleaning based on Home Assistant areas. Instead of vendor-specific identifiers, you can now tell the vacuum to clean specific areas defined directly in Home Assistant - the same ones you already use to control lights or heating.

Robot vacuum map with Home Assistant areas highlighted

Support in this release covers the Matter, Ecovacs, and Roborock integrations. Home Assistant also automatically detects when the vacuum's segment map changes (typically after a re-mapping) and creates a repair notification so you can review the mapping.

Custom automations

If you want to trigger cleaning based on your own rules (presence, time, manual button), check out my introduction to automations.

Major Energy Dashboard Update​

The Energy dashboard received a pinned date picker in the January release and more improvements in February. March continues the streak.

Real-Time Consumption Tracking​

The Now tab features new badges showing the instantaneous consumption of electricity, gas, and water. You finally get a clear view of what is drawing the most energy right now without having to jump between graphs.

New electricity, gas, and water badges on the Now tab in the Energy dashboard

Electricity, Gas, and Water Tabs​

The Energy section is now renamed to Electricity - it makes more sense once the dashboard tracks gas and water alongside electricity. At the same time, the Energy dashboard settings have been split into three clean tabs: Electricity, Gas, and Water.

Reworked Energy dashboard settings with Electricity, Gas, and Water tabs

A new Sankey chart has been added for water, so you can see the water flow through individual appliances just like you do for electricity. Bar chart tooltips also now display the day of the week - a small touch that's very useful when comparing your household's behavior on weekdays versus weekends.

Continue on Error - Now in the Visual Editor​

Until now, if you wanted an automation that did not stop at the first failing action, you had to dive into YAML and add continue_on_error: true manually. For most users this was a barrier.

This option is now available directly in the visual automation editor. For each action you can mark with a single click that the automation should continue even if the action fails. The editor also visually distinguishes actions that have this option enabled, so you can quickly see where the automation will skip over a problem.

Continue on error option in the visual automation editor

In practice this is invaluable for "turn off all lights in the house" type automations - if one bulb is offline, the automation finishes everything else instead of stopping halfway through.

On-Device Wake Word Detection on Android (Experimental)​

The Companion app for Android received experimental support for on-device wake word detection in this release. Using microWakeWord technology you can turn your phone or tablet into a voice endpoint that constantly listens for one of three wake words:

  • Okay Nabu
  • Hey Jarvis
  • Hey Mycroft

The whole wake word recognition runs locally on the device - no audio leaves your phone until the wake word is detected. Only then does the app send the recording to Home Assistant for further processing.

Battery impact

Continuous access to the microphone and CPU means a significant impact on battery life. If you want to use this feature on a phone, I recommend enabling it conditionally - for example only when the phone is connected to your home Wi-Fi or charger. Building such an automation takes only a few minutes.

New Integrations​

We welcome 17 new integrations in this release:

Notable Improvements to Existing Integrations​

From the long list of improvements, here are the most interesting picks:

  • Matter - added support for carbon monoxide alarm states and TVOC air quality sensors
  • SmartThings - dual-cavity Samsung oven support, dishwasher washing options control
  • Roborock - full Zeo washer and dryer support with program and temperature control
  • Reolink - five new diagonal/continuous rotation PTZ buttons and patrol status reporting
  • UniFi Protect - PTZ preset actions and live state updates
  • ESPHome - improvements as part of the ongoing bidirectional communication work
  • KNX - number entity configuration and periodic state re-sending
  • OpenAI Conversation - gpt-image-1.5 model for faster image generation
  • Anthropic - Claude Opus 4.6 model with adaptive thinking and structured outputs
  • SwitchBot - password programming for Keypad Vision, slow mode for curtains
  • Alexa Devices - Amazon Air Quality Monitor support
  • Renault - remote horn and light controls
  • Tessie - energy remaining sensor and battery health diagnostics
  • Proxmox VE - CPU, memory, and disk usage sensors
  • SleepIQ - five new sleep health sensors per sleeper

Three integrations that previously required YAML can now be set up from the UI: InfluxDB, Ness Alarm, and Splunk.

Other Notable Changes​

  • The voice assistant can now use Assist to remove items from to-do lists
  • The statistics graph card editor gained a Year option as a period
  • The security dashboard now also displays window-type covers
  • Sections views support footer cards
  • Matter, Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Bluetooth settings got a cleaner organization

Backward-Incompatible Changes​

This release contains a few important changes to watch out for:

  • Lights - the mireds-based color_temp parameter has been removed. Use Kelvin values from now on (this also affects the LIFX integration, where the color_temp parameter for pulse effects was removed)
  • Container - images are now compressed with zstd, so you need Docker 23.0+ or containerd 1.5.0+
  • Tado - mobile device tracking (device_tracker) has been removed
  • Snapcast - group media player entities and grouping actions have been removed
  • StarLine - ignition and autostart attributes have been removed, replaced with binary sensors
  • Z-Wave - fan percentage values have been corrected for consistency
  • Template - errors on fan entities now return unavailable, and the unknown state has been added
  • BSB-Lan - water heater operation mode now reports performance instead of on; update your automations
  • Satel Integra - binary sensors and switches now initialize as unknown instead of off

As always, the full list of changes is available in the official documentation.

More Information​

What Came Next​

The follow-up 2026.4 brought native infrared control through ESPHome proxies, cross-domain purpose-specific triggers, and PIN code management for Matter locks.

Release Party Video​

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