Home Assistant 2026.11 rebuilds entity naming and changes displayed names on every dashboard
Released on November 4, 2026, Home Assistant 2026.11 is the largest release the project has ever shipped, with 5,827 pull requests. Its main break is not the Marketplace: it is the backward-incompatible rework of entity naming, which will change the names shown on your dashboards — plan for it before you update.
November 4, 2026. Home Assistant shipped version 2026.11. 5,827. That is the number of pull requests merged by 557 contributors, making it the largest release the project has ever delivered. November 9. That is the date of the 2026.11.1 patch. Why it matters: the real break in this release is not the Marketplace, but the entity-naming rework — a backward-incompatible change that will alter the names shown on your dashboards, even though your automations keep working.
A “ridiculously large” release with a break in the middle
The release post from Frenck sets the tone: “the biggest release we’ve ever shipped, by far.” Coverage has focused on the Marketplace, the folding of HACS into core — we analyzed that in our piece on the HACS absorption. But for an existing user, the change that touches every installation is entity naming.
This project has been years in the making. Home Assistant pulled the change from 2026.4 after beta feedback, then reworked it. The result, announced in a dedicated post on November 3, is a promise: you name each thing once, and Home Assistant adds the context around it. The trade-off is explicit: some displayed names will change.
The problem it solves: names that repeat themselves
To understand the rework, go back to the project’s history. In 2013, Home Assistant only knew entities: an entity name had to carry all its context, hence “Kitchen coffee machine power” and whole community guides devoted to keeping names consistent. Then structure arrived in layers — devices in 2018, areas in 2019, floors and labels in 2024 — without the naming ever being rebuilt underneath.
The result is a system where an entity name can hold a copy of its device name, which itself holds a copy of its area. Moving a coffee machine to another room made every one of its entity names wrong. The 2026.11 rework cuts that knot: no name holds a copy of another anymore.
The new model: one name per thing, context added where needed
The principle is clean. A smart plug powering a coffee machine in the kitchen becomes: an area “Kitchen”, a device “Coffee machine”, and three entities “Power”, “Energy”, and the switch. Home Assistant recomposes the display depending on where you look:
- on the area page, the device shows as “Coffee machine”, not “Kitchen coffee machine”;
- on the device page, the entities show as “Power” and “Energy”;
- in an entity picker listing every power sensor in the house, each row also shows the device and area to tell them apart.
The most concrete addition is the “main entity”: a plug’s switch shows with the device name alone, “Coffee machine”, because it is the thing that turns the machine on and off. Renaming the device rather than the switch becomes the right habit.
Composite devices are split into child devices: a four-socket power strip becomes one device and four child devices, each with its own name — “Kettle”, “Lamp” — and its own area. Z-Wave, MQTT, ESPHome and some Tuya devices support them from this release; Matter and ZHA are in progress.
What changes for you, concretely
Three things to watch before and after the update.
First, dashboards. Cards, badges and rows without a manually set name will show the new default name with its context, instead of the friendly name. Names you already set on a card stay exactly as they are.
Second, migration. On update, Home Assistant migrates the names of entities you renamed in the past. If an entity name already starts with its device name (“Coffee machine power usage”), the device part is removed — the entity becomes “Power usage”. Otherwise, nothing changes except context being added where it was missing. In the second case, a switch you renamed “Coffee machine” on a “Smart plug 3” device will show as “Smart plug 3 Coffee machine”: that is the most visible case, and it is fixed by renaming the device and enabling “Main entity of the device”.
Third, what does not move. Entity IDs, automations, scripts, scenes and dashboards keep working: they reference entities by ID, not by displayed name. For entities exposed to Assist, Alexa or Google Assistant, the old name is kept as an alias so voice commands keep working.
The friendly name is kept for backward compatibility but is deprecated: removal is announced, with no date yet. Jinja templates that still read it should move to entity_name(), device_name() and area_name().
A change that keeps rolling out
The naming rework is not a one-release event. Child devices arrive first for Z-Wave, MQTT, ESPHome and part of Tuya, with Matter and ZHA explicitly “in progress.” The friendly name is deprecated but not removed — Home Assistant promises to announce any removal ahead of time so card authors can update first. Expect several releases of incremental migration before the model settles. Home Assistant is also treating this as a long migration: the release notes explicitly thank the beta testers from 2026.4 and ask anyone who spots a wrong name to report it on the forums or Discord.
The Marketplace, the other headline
The Marketplace folds HACS into core — we analyzed it in our piece on the HACS absorption. For an existing user, the essentials fit in three points: everything already installed stays installed, updates keep flowing, and the HACS install hurdle is gone — the Marketplace is simply there, under Settings, on every installation type. For maintainers, the change is elsewhere: the Marketplace accepts custom repositories, and downloads go through the project’s regular publication process. It is the first brick of a storefront Home Assistant wants to grow over several releases.
The rest of the release, quickly
38 new integrations enter the catalog, including a debug console for developers. On the user side, excluding items from a target is the most useful everyday addition: turn on all the downstairs lights except the kitchen one, and the exclusion stays smart if you add a kitchen lamp next month. Add to that LoRaWAN support for the far corners, Matter cameras with two-way talk, batteryless Zigbee Green Power switches, backups on local drives, and a reworked “why did that happen” that follows a trace into the script it called — with live logs per integration.
Verdict
Update, but budget thirty minutes for name review rather than a single click on “Update”. The rework is backward-incompatible by design, and it is the kind of change you discover on a dashboard at 10 p.m. when a displayed name no longer matches. If your Jinja templates or custom cards read friendly_name, migrate them to entity_name(), device_name() and area_name() before or right after the update. If you run a large Z-Wave or ESPHome setup with multi-socket strips, do the update in a maintenance window and screenshot a few dashboards first — child devices will reshuffle how the sockets appear. Otherwise the release is solid — 2026.11.1 has already absorbed the first fixes — and the arrival of child devices finally makes multi-socket setups readable.