The self-hosted smart home platform's June release flips the dashboard editor on its head. Instead of opening on a wall of card types named after internal building blocks, the new card picker in Home Assistant 2026.6 opens on a tree of floors, areas, devices, and entities. Pick a light and the right side fills with live previews of cards that actually fit it (a tile, a brightness slider, a toggle, color temperature, favorite colors), each rendered with real data before you commit. Custom cards can opt in to the new picker by adding a getEntitySuggestion function to their window.customCards entry, as documented in the developer blog post. The change is the first visible step of a broader Open Home Foundation roadmap effort to make dashboard building feel as natural as automation building.
Infrared becomes a two-way platform this release. Two months after the Infrared entity platform shipped as a sender, a new receiver event entity lets transmitter integrations expose the IR commands they pick up as events. ESPHome is the first transmitter on board, meaning any ESP32 with an IR receiver wired up can act as a whole-house IR listener, and LG Infrared is the first device integration to consume it. Two new IR device integrations land alongside it: Marantz Infrared and Samsung Infrared, both launching at silver quality. A new LG TV via Serial integration also arrives at silver, controlling LG sets over RS-232 through a direct cable, a USB-to-serial adapter, or an ESPHome-based serial proxy, including while the TV is in standby.
The automation editor picks up live test indicator badges on every condition row (green check for pass, red for fail, neutral for incomplete), target counts on every floor, area, device, and label pill so a "Bedrooms" target tells you it expands to twelve entities, and a dedicated Notes field on every trigger, condition, action, and script step that travels with blueprints and exports. The Labs preview of purpose-specific triggers and conditions adds four new zone triggers and four new zone conditions to replace the removed entered_home, left_home, is_home, and is_not_home building blocks, now working against any defined zone rather than just home. Z-Wave smart locks gain the credential management dialog that Matter locks got two releases ago, with the Z-Wave version adding password support (full character set) alongside PIN codes, all handled directly between Home Assistant and the lock over Z-Wave with no cloud or vendor app.
A quieter but significant change: the default Bluetooth scanning mode for both the Bluetooth integration and ESPHome Bluetooth proxies switches to Auto, dynamically alternating between active and passive scanning depending on whether an integration actually needs active mode. The project reports roughly 95 to 96 percent less battery used for Bluetooth scanning. OpenThread Border Router 1.4 also exits beta, shipping Thread 1.4 by default with a new built-in mDNS implementation that should resolve a class of Thread connectivity issues traced to mDNS quirks in home routers. On the AI side, the Anthropic integration adds Claude web fetch tool support, and a new OVHcloud AI Endpoints integration brings a Europe-hosted catalog of open-weight large language models to Assist.
The release also removes the legacy template platform syntax (under individual alarm_control_panel, binary_sensor, cover, fan, light, lock, sensor, switch, vacuum, and weather keys) after a six-month deprecation period, with a migration guide in the community forum. The legacy Konnected integration, deprecated in 2025.10, is gone too, with users directed to flash their hardware with ESPHome firmware per Konnected's migration guide. Home Assistant 2026.6 is available now through the usual update channels, with the full changelog covering everything else.
