Home Assistant 2026.10: trigger IDs get a real UI, and Cloud is becoming Link

Home Assistant 2026.10.0 came out on October 7, 2026. The headline is a proper UI for trigger IDs: you tick which triggers a condition should match, and Home Assistant manages the IDs for you. Maps move to vector tiles from the OpenStreetMap Foundation, proxied through your own instance. There are 15 new integrations, several of them local energy integrations, including a SolarEdge one that talks Modbus to the inverter with no account. And the release notes repeat Nabu Casa’s October 2 announcement: Home Assistant Cloud is being renamed Home Assistant Link, with the change planned for the December 2026.12 release.

Short version: a good release for a local-first house, with more local control in it than cloud. Most people can update, but the breaking changes list is long. If you have non-admin users who press MQTT buttons on a dashboard, users whose login names have capitals or stray spaces, or state conditions that combine for with an attribute, read the list first. If none of that is you and you’d rather not be the first to find a bug, wait a few days for 2026.10.1.

What’s new for a local-first house

Trigger IDs without the bookkeeping

Trigger IDs let one automation do the job of two: motion on and motion off in one automation, with a “Triggered by” condition picking the branch. Until now you had to invent the IDs and remember them. In 2026.10 you add a Triggered by condition and tick the triggers it should match, numbered by their position in the list. Home Assistant makes the IDs and cleans them up when you delete a trigger.

IDs you wrote yourself in YAML keep working, and Home Assistant won’t add new ones to your YAML. The ID field itself is gone from the visual editor.

A map that goes through your own instance

After the last release, the old map provider started demanding an API key, which broke every map in Home Assistant. The fix is a new Map tiles integration that fetches vector tiles from the OpenStreetMap Foundation through your Home Assistant instance, so your browser doesn’t contact tile servers directly. It caches recently used tiles in memory, so the map survives a short internet drop, but it still needs the internet to load new areas.

New local integrations

SolarEdge Local, the old integration, is removed in the same release. SolarEdge disabled the local web API it used in firmware from 2020. If you run a SolarEdge inverter and want local data, the new SolarEdge Modbus integration is the route. Its docs warn that SolarEdge may drop Modbus over Wi-Fi in future firmware, so wire the inverter with Ethernet if you can.

Z-Wave, Matter and Thread

• Z-Wave gets three new automation conditions (node status, a configuration parameter’s value, any Z-Wave value) with proper fields, and the triggers got the same treatment. The network map has a new neighbors toggle that draws the real mesh, off by default. I run Shelly Wave 1PM relays on Z-Wave, so these land in my house.
• Matter adds switches for the alarms on supported leak sensors such as the IKEA KLIPPBOK, a one-touch locking switch for locks, and frequency and power factor on power-measuring devices.
• LIFX now supports LIFX lights that connect over Thread. The LIFX A19 Color in my catalog is the Wi-Fi model.
• Zigbee: I couldn’t find any ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT change in the release notes.

Other changes worth a look

• ESPHome devices can now open the connection to Home Assistant themselves with an outgoing_connection option, for networks where Home Assistant can’t reach the device.
• Teslemetry can send Powerwall commands over your LAN and vehicle commands over Bluetooth, falling back to the cloud when the local route isn’t available.
• UniFi Protect supports the key fob and shows relay inputs as binary sensors.
• Philips Hue gets a switch for each MotionAware zone, and rooms get a scene select. Both come through the Hue integration, which talks to the Hue Bridge locally.

Voice, AI and dashboards

Assist changes are small: climate fan modes can be set by voice, and AI music search picks the best match instead of the first result. The bigger AI change is the MCP server, which you can now turn on with one click from a renamed “AI” page under Settings > System. New setups expose everything and only allow administrator accounts.

On dashboards, card visibility gets the full set of automation conditions (sun, zone, template, device), and the Visibility tab tells you why a card is hidden.

Breaking changes that will bite someone

• Login names. The legacy mode of the built-in auth provider is gone. Usernames are always lowercase with no leading or trailing spaces. If Home Assistant showed you a repair about usernames, fix them before you update.
• MQTT from a dashboard. mqtt.publish and mqtt.dump now need an administrator when a person calls them: a dashboard button, developer tools, or running a script by hand. Automations on their own triggers are fine. Synology DSM’s reboot and shutdown actions changed the same way.
• State conditions. A state condition that combines for with an attribute, a list of states or another entity’s state now fails the config check.
• UniFi Network. Re-adding the same site to reconfigure it no longer works; use Reconfigure.
• Proxmox VE. Uptime is now a start timestamp, not seconds. Templates doing maths on it need rewriting.
• Removed: SolarEdge Local and Melnor RainCloud, among others.

The full list is in the backward-incompatible changes section.

Update now, or wait for 2026.10.1?

Last month, 2026.9.1 followed 2026.9.0 three days later, and three more patch releases came by September 27. No one has said 2026.10 will go the same way.

• Update now if nothing in the breaking list touches you and you want the trigger ID editor or the SolarEdge integration. Take a backup first.
• Wait for .1 if your house runs on Home Assistant with no fallback, or if any item in the breaking list is yours to fix.

Which of my guides this touches

• Home Assistant Cloud vs Tailscale vs Cloudflare Tunnel. The advice stands, but the name changes. From the December release, Home Assistant Cloud will be called Home Assistant Link. Nabu Casa calls it the same service with a new name and says the smart home keeps working without it.
• Best energy monitoring for solar homes. That guide says some SolarEdge setups make local data hard. With a core Modbus integration that reads the inverter directly, that’s less true for SolarEdge owners with Modbus TCP.

I’ll update this page if 2026.10.1 fixes anything that matters for a local-first setup.