2025.5: Two Million Strong and Getting Better

Franck Nijhof May 7, 2025

• Core
• Release-Notes

Comments

Home Assistant 2025.5! 🎉

It’s time for the May release, and we have a lot to talk about! But before we do, I want to quickly touch on things that happened in the last month that you might have missed…

We recently hosted our State of the Open Home event—a live streamed show where we discussed the current state and future vision of the Open Home Foundation and its projects, including Home Assistant. During this event, we not only revealed our roadmap for the upcoming year but also celebrated a tremendous milestone:

2,000,000 active installations of Home Assistant worldwide! 🎉

Read more about the State of the Open Home in this summarized blog post

A community of 2 million households is something to celebrate! And we are doing that by gathering together in person on Home Assistant Community Day on May 24th 2025; over fifty! meetups are being organized all around the world! Want to learn more? Join a meetup? Or even host one?

Check out the Home Assistant Community Day 2025 blog post for more information!

Ok, the May release, really, I love this one! It is filled to the brim with quality of life improvements that I’m sure you will love. 🥰

The quest for a great backup system is continuing this release, shipping quite the list of improvements, most notably the ability to set a retention policy per backup location! Nabu Casa throws in a whole bunch of new text-to-speech voice variants 🗣️ included in your Home Assistant Cloud subscription, allowing your announcements to sound, for example, sad or happy!

But… there is more! Z-Wave gets Long Range support 📶, you can now copy and paste YAML automation snippets directly in our automation UI, a new tool to monitor the device discovery process in Home Assistant, and–my personal favorite–the improved experience when you pick an entity anywhere in the UI. 🤩

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

• Another iteration of the backup system
  • Per location backup retention policy settings
  • Backup before upgrading the Home Assistant Operating System
  • Set the default backup preference for upgrades
  • Waiting for the backup to finish on restarts
• Lots of new text-to-speech voice variants for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers
• Picking entities
• Z-Wave Long Range support and improved Smart Start
• Integrations
  • New integrations
  • Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations
  • Integration quality scale achievements
  • Now available to set up from the UI
  • Farewell to the following
• Other noteworthy changes
• Badges on the dashboard can now be wrapped or scrolled
• Improved UI experience when using templates in automations & scripts
• Pasting automations and scripts YAML directly into the UI
• Discover what Home Assistant is discovering
• Need help? Join the community!
• Backward-incompatible changes
• All changes

Another iteration of the backup system

In our January release, we did the first overhaul of the backup system. In the February release, we did an iteration based on your feedback. In this release, we dedicated even more time to iterate and improve backups even further.

Let’s dive in!

Per location backup retention policy settings

This release adds a much-requested feature: the ability to set a backup retention policy per location. This is particularly useful if you have multiple backup locations configured in Home Assistant.

It might be that one of your backup locations has more storage space than another, or that you want to keep more backups in one location than another. For example, maybe you have space to store the last 3 backups in your Google Drive, but you want to keep 25 backups on your local NAS server.

Backup before upgrading the Home Assistant Operating System

Updating the Home Assistant Operating System is as easy as clicking a button. And while the upgrade process has a fallback mechanism in case the upgrade process fails, it is always a good idea to have a recent backup in multiple locations before you start the upgrade process.

To help you with that, the update dialog for the Home Assistant Operating System now includes the option to create a backup before starting the upgrade process. Selecting this will create a backup that follows the same settings as your automatic backups (and if you don’t have that configured yet, it will just backup your settings, history, and add-ons), uploading this to all enabled backup locations before starting the upgrade process.

This way, you can be sure that you have a backup of your system before upgrading, even if something goes wrong beyond the safeguards of the operating system upgrade.

Set the default backup preference for upgrades

The above option to backup before upgrade is great, but the feedback on the toggle to create a backup before upgrade is mixed. Some of you prefer to always backup before upgrading, while others rely on their scheduled backups and don’t want to be bothered with the backup process whenever they upgrade a part of Home Assistant.

To please both groups, we have added a new setting to the backup settings page to set the default behavior for the backup before upgrade toggle.

When you set the option to “Backup before upgrade”, the toggle will be enabled by default, otherwise it will default to disabled. There is an additional option to set this behavior for add-ons as well, so you can tweak it to your liking.

Waiting for the backup to finish on restarts

Another small but important improvement is that if you initiate a restart of Home Assistant while a backup is in progress, your system will wait for the backup to finish before restarting.

This prevents the unintended situation where a backup is in progress, and you abort the process by restarting Home Assistant.

Lots of new text-to-speech voice variants for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers

If you are subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud, you not only get backup storage included, but you also get access to the most speedy, super accurate text-to-speech available. If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the perfect time to sign up for the 30-day trial!

This release extends the already staggering number of text-to-speech voices, but also now includes voice variants and styles. This means that you can now choose between different voice styles and tones, such as “friendly”, “angry”, “sad”, “whisper”, etc., allowing you to customize your announcements to fit the mood and context of the situation.

Picking entities

We are working on improving the context of things shown in the UI. This is to ensure you always know which device or entity you are looking at, no matter where you are in the Home Assistant interface.

In the last release, we already had a small noteworthy change regarding this. We added the device and area to the entity information dialogs, so you always know exactly which entity you are viewing.

In this release, we have improved the context provided within the entity pickers in our UI. This is the dropdown you see when you select an entity in, for example, a card, automation, or script. This picker will now show the device and area name as well!

This enhancement gradually eliminates the need for you to manually rename entities or devices to include location information—giving you a much better out-of-the-box experience with less setup work.

Not only has the visual appearance of the picker improved, but the search functionality has been completely overhauled too! 🔎 Finding the exact entity you’re looking for is now significantly easier thanks to a smarter search algorithm and the addition of more contextual information in the matching process.

Tip

You might notice that the entity ID isn’t shown in the picker anymore!

We think we are at a point where you may solely rely on the UI and the entity ID is not needed anymore. However, if you do prefer to see the entity ID in this drop down, you can enable it in your profile settings.

To do so, select your profile picture in the bottom left corner of the Home Assistant UI, and under User settings enable the Display entity IDs in picker option.

Z-Wave Long Range support and improved Smart Start

We are providing quite a few enhancements to the Z-Wave integration and experience in this release. Our commercial partner Nabu Casa is working on a not-so-secret Z-Wave antenna, and we want to ensure that Home Assistant is ready for it by providing the best user experience possible.

This release, we improved the whole experience in setting up new Z-Wave devices, including improved support for setting up new Z-Wave devices by scanning the Smart Start QR code.

Z-Wave Smart Start QR scanning now works natively in our mobile companion apps, removing browser limitations. Added devices are immediately visible in Home Assistant, even if the device is not yet powered on. Once powered on or rebooted, the device will automatically be added to your Z-Wave network.

The most exciting part of this release is the addition of Z-Wave Long Range support. This is a new Z-Wave technology that allows devices to communicate over much longer distances than traditional Z-Wave devices. This is especially useful if you have a specific device that needs to be placed far away, for example, a contact sensor on a gate or mailbox up your driveway.

You can choose if you want to add the Z-Wave device to the existing mesh network or connect it directly using Long Range.

After scanning the QR code of a Long Range capable device, you will get the option to either add it to the existing mesh network or connect it directly using Long Range. Both have pros and cons, mesh networking is recommended for most devices, but if you have a device that needs to be placed far away, Long Range might be the better option.

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• AWS S3, added by @tomasbedrich
  Use an Amazon S3 storage bucket as a backup location for your Home Assistant backups.
• Imeon Inverter, added by @Imeon-Energy
  Integrates your Imeon inverter, allowing you to monitor your home battery and solar usage in the energy dashboard.
• Miele, added by @astrandb
  Monitor and control your Miele home appliances, including washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, and more!
• ntfy, added by @tr4nt0r
  Integrates with ntfy.sh, a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service that allows you to send notifications to your phones or desktops.
• Rehlko, added by @PeteRager
  Monitor the status of your Rehlko (formerly Kohler Energy Management) enabled Kohler generator.

This release also has new virtual integrations. Virtual integrations are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability. These ones are new:

• Balay, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Constructa, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Gaggenau, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Google Gemini, provided by Google Generative AI, added by @tronikos
• Maytag, provided by Whirlpool, added by @abmantis
• National Grid US, provided by Opower, added by @tronikos
• Neff, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Pitsos, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Profilo, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Siemens, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98
• Thermador, provided by Home Connect, added by @Diegorro98

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy changes to existing integrations:

• The OpenAI Conversation integration now supports PDFs in the openai_conversion.generate_content action, meaning it can now, for example, summarize PDF reports for you. Great work @Shulyaka!
• @allenporter added a new LLM tool for fetching to-do list items, enabling you to interact with the contents of your to-do lists via voice or chat assistants. Awesome!
• The HomeKit Bridge integration now has support for air purifiers! Thanks @MaartenStaa!
• @frenck extended the YouTube integration, allowing you to monitor your own YouTube channel 📺. Nice!
• The HEOS integration received multiple improvements from @andrewsayre, including the ability to add items to the play queue and remove queued items.
• Thanks to @Danielhiversen, the Mill integration now includes statistics, making it possible to track your heating energy usage over time. Great!
• The Xiaomi BLE integration now supports the Body Composition Scale S400, thanks @zry98!
• SwitchBot now supports Roller Shade and HubMini Matter devices. Nice job @zerzhang!
• @lezmaka worked on the Synology DSM integration, which now includes support for external USB drives, allowing you to monitor external storage. Nice!
• The La Marzocco integration has been extended with additional sensors and statistic entities, providing better insights into your coffee machine’s performance. Great additions @zweckj!

Integration quality scale achievements

One thing we are incredibly proud of in Home Assistant is our integration quality scale. This scale helps us and our contributors to ensure integrations are of high quality, maintainable, and provide the best possible user experience.

This release, we celebrate several integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have improved their quality scale:

• 4 integrations reached platinum 🏆

  • Ohme, thanks to @dan-r
  • Vodafone Station, thanks to @chemelli74
  • ESPHome, thanks to @bdraco
  • Enphase Envoy, thanks to @catsmanac

• 2 integrations reached silver 🥈

  • IMGW-PIB, thanks to @bieniu
  • SMLIGHT, thanks to @tl-sl

• 2 integrations reached bronze 🥉

  • Whirlpool, thanks to @abmantis
  • UptimeRobot, thanks to @chemelli74

This is a huge achievement for these integrations and their maintainers. The effort and dedication required to reach these quality levels is significant, as it involves extensive testing, documentation, error handling, and often complete rewrites of parts of the integration.

A big thank you to all the contributors involved! 👏

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone to set up and use.

The following integration is now available via the Home Assistant UI:

• STIEBEL ELTRON, done by @ThyMYthOS

Farewell to the following

The following integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] are also no longer available as of this release:

• Oncue by Kohler has been removed because the app by Kohler has been discontinued.

Other noteworthy changes

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

• Did you know Home Assistant actually has keyboard shortcuts for all kinds of things? No? Well… if you are curious to learn, after upgrading, press ? anywhere in the UI to see a list of all available keyboard shortcuts. Nice addition @jpbede!
• Support for the Matter 1.4 water heater device type has been added. Thanks, @lboue!
• When setting up a new device in Home Assistant, you can now directly name it during the setup process. Nice! Thanks, @bramkragten!
• Media players now have an action to search using the media_player.search_media action. Thanks, @zweckj!
• @piitaya added a device_name template function to get the name of a device in Home Assistant. Cool!
• The floor_id and area_id template methods have been enhanced by @formatBCE to also look for floors or area aliases. Awesome!
• We now have support for trigger-based template entities for switches and lights. Amazing work @Petro31!
• Support for modern YAML-syntax was also added to the cover template entities by @Petro31. Nice!
• @frenck added support for detecting Home Assistant Container installation types not running in host networking mode. This is important for Home Assistant to function properly. It raises a repair issue if it detects this.
• A long-standing issue with iOS and the dropdown items in our user interface has been fixed! No longer will it select the wrong item when you tap on it while the dropdown is open and the keyboard is shown.

Badges on the dashboard can now be wrapped or scrolled

A cool little new feature for dashboards landed this release, which we don’t want to rush past unnoticed. The behavior of the badges in the header of a dashboard view can now be configured to either wrap or scroll.

Wrap was the original and is still the default behavior, but if you have a lot of badges and primarily use a mobile device, scrolling might be a better option for you.

Improved UI experience when using templates in automations & scripts

If you are a power-user, using templates in your automations and script, you are probably familiar with the fact that the UI falls back to using YAML for any action block that contains a template.

@karwosts to the rescue! He has worked on a solution to improve this experience.

So, instead of falling back to pure YAML for the whole block, it now only falls back to a code editor for fields containing an action template. This means the rest of the UI—for all other action fields—remains intact and you can still use the UI to edit the rest.

As you can see in this screenshot below, the brightness is set using a template, which is no problem, as the rest of the action is still editable in the UI.

This is a great improvement for power users, as it allows you to use the UI for most of the automation or script, while still being able to use templates where needed. It also makes it easier to understand the automation or script, as you can see the context of the template in the UI.

Great improvement there @karwosts! 🙌

Pasting automations and scripts YAML directly into the UI

Found this great automation or script example in our documentation or the community forums, but it is shared in YAML format? No problem! You can now paste the YAML directly into the UI.

When you are editing an automation, you can now simply paste the YAML directly into the UI editor and it will be converted to the UI format. This is regardless of whether the pasted example is a full-blown automation or just a single trigger, condition, or action.

An amazing quality of life improvement, contributed by @jpbede! Thank you! 🙌

Discover what Home Assistant is discovering

Home Assistant is constantly scanning your network for new devices and integrations using all sorts of discovery protocols. This greatly improves your experience, as it allows you to easily add new devices to your Home Assistant installation.

However, sometimes, you might want to know what Home Assistant is seeing or wonder why a certain device is not being discovered. To help with that @bdraco added browsing tools for the DHCP, mDNS/ZeroConf, and UPnP/SSDP that allow you to see what Home Assistant is seeing. It is quite technical, but it is a great way to see what is going on in your network.

You can find these new tools in Settings > System > Network. At the bottom of that page, you will find the ability to browse all the things Home Assistant is seeing on your network for each of the discovery protocols.

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance on more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes, it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

--ha-font-family-body
--ha-font-family-heading
--ha-font-family-code
--ha-font-family-longform
--ha-font-size-scale
--ha-font-size-2xs
--ha-font-size-xs
--ha-font-size-s
--ha-font-size-m
--ha-font-size-l
--ha-font-size-xl
--ha-font-size-2xl
--ha-font-size-3xl
--ha-font-size-4xl
--ha-font-weight-light
--ha-font-weight-normal
--ha-font-weight-medium
--ha-font-weight-bold
--ha-font-weight-body
--ha-font-weight-heading
--ha-font-weight-action
--ha-line-height-condensed
--ha-line-height-normal
--ha-line-height-expanded
--ha-font-smoothing

--paper-font-common-nowrap_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-display1_-_letter-spacing
--paper-font-headline_-_letter-spacing
--paper-font-common-base_-_font-family
--paper-font-common-base_-_-webkit-font-smoothing
--paper-font-common-code_-_font-family
--paper-font-common-code_-_-webkit-font-smoothing
--paper-font-common-nowrap_-_white-space
--paper-font-common-nowrap_-_overflow
--paper-font-title_-_overflow
--paper-font-title_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-title_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-title_-_white-space
--paper-item-body-two-line-min-height
--paper-time-input-justify-content
--paper-item-body-three-line-min-height
--paper-item-icon-width
--paper-card-header-color
--paper-dialog-color
--paper-font-headline_-_white-space
--paper-font-headline_-_overflow
--paper-font-headline_-_text-overflow
--paper-font-subhead_-_white-space
--paper-font-subhead_-_overflow
--paper-font-subhead_-_text-overflow
--paper-item-icon-active-color
--paper-listbox-background-color

--code-font-family → --ha-font-family-code
--paper-font-title_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-headline_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-display1_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-subhead_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-body1_-_-webkit-font-smoothing → --ha-font-smoothing
--paper-font-display1_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-display1_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-4xl
--paper-font-display1_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-display1_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-condensed
--paper-font-headline_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-headline_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-2xl
--paper-font-headline_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-headline_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-condensed
--paper-font-title_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-title_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-xl
--paper-font-title_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-medium
--paper-font-title_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-normal
--paper-font-subhead_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-subhead_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-l
--paper-font-subhead_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-subhead_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-normal
--paper-font-body1_-_font-family → --ha-font-family-body
--paper-font-body1_-_font-size → --ha-font-size-m
--paper-font-body1_-_font-weight → --ha-font-weight-normal
--paper-font-body1_-_line-height → --ha-line-height-normal
--paper-item-icon-color → --state-icon-color

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following changes are the most notable for this release:

• Searching in media players
• Device tracker TrackerEntity location accuracy attribute type change

All changes

Of course there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2025.5