Home Assistant is closing out the year with its 2025.12 release, bringing major quality of life improvements, an overhaul to automation building, and a new area for testing preview features. There’s a lot here to give you more intuitive control over your smart homes.
The biggest underlying change in this release is the focus on purpose-specific triggers and conditions for automations. For a long time, automations relied on technical, numeric states, which often made building complex logic frustrating. Now, Home Assistant lets you simply say, “When a light turns on” or “If the thermostat is heating.”
If you want to automate something, you typically think about the target first, whether that’s a device, an entity, or an entire area. The new system supports broader targeting, meaning you can trigger an automation whenever any light in your living room turns on without having to list every single bulb.
This makes managing devices much simpler, especially when you add or remove hardware, because the automation stays tied to the physical area. This targeting also extends to floors and even labels, which is perfect timing for the holidays if you want to check if any of your Christmas lights are left on.
The dashboard editor also received a new undo and redo feature. This is great because editing can be stressful when you’re trying to tweak a complex card, but now you can experiment safely. The editor tracks up to 75 changes, letting you restore previous configurations with a single click.
You can also now manually reorder areas and floors. Before, these were stuck in alphabetical or numerical order, which often meant your less important spaces appeared at the top of the list. Now you can head into the settings and drag and drop areas and floors into an order that actually makes sense for your home layout.
This release also introduces Home Assistant Labs, a new dedicated panel for previewing features before they officially land in the main release. These aren’t unstable beta features because they’re fully built and tested, but they might change or disappear based on community feedback. The first feature available in Labs is the Winter Mode. If you enable it, you’ll see snowflakes drift across your dashboard, which is a fun way to get into the holiday spirit.
The Energy dashboard, which has been helping us track kWh for years, is getting upgrades focused on real-time data and utilities. You can now configure power sensors alongside your energy sensors to track real-time grid consumption in watts. This lets users see exactly how much power an appliance is drawing right now, rather than just the cumulative usage over time.
Additionally, Home Assistant has improved support for downstream water meters. While water consumption tracking has been around, you couldn’t easily see where that water was going. Now, if you have meters on your pool or smart irrigation system, you can track them separately. This data is visualized using a new water sankey card.
Home Assistant has updated the voice assistant debug interface. This lets you inspect the system prompt that guides the AI’s behavior, along with any specific tool calls it made to generate an answer. This is a feature that will tell you why the AI decided to skip over an entity or call a specific tool, making troubleshooting easier.
Finally, Android users get a handy mobile update. You can now add entities to widgets and Android Auto favorites directly from the entity’s “more info” dialog within the Companion app.
Before updating, keep in mind that After a six-month deprecation period, Home Assistant has fully removed support for the Core and Supervised installation methods, as well as all 32-bit system architectures. If you’re still running on an older 32-bit system, you’ll need to migrate to a supported architecture soon to keep receiving updates, including critical security fixes.
Source: Home Assistant
