Home Assistant 2026.11 can fill a dashboard section with every light on a floor or every battery in chosen rooms

A dashboard card that lists "all the lights downstairs" goes out of date the day you add a new bulb. A new entities section strategy in the Home Assistant frontend fixes that: you describe what the section should contain, and Home Assistant builds the tiles itself and keeps them in step as matching entities appear or disappear. Paul Bottein's change was merged on 26 October 2026, together with a new dialog for choosing the type of section. Both are in the development branch and set for Home Assistant 2026.11.

What you choose

The section takes two things: the entity types to show, such as lights or batteries, and the targets to search. Targets work like those of an action, so they can be areas, floors, devices, labels or single entities, and you can exclude some of them. On top of that you set a title, how tiles are named and whether they are grouped by area, by floor or by type.

Configuration and diagnostic entities are left out unless you switch them on. There is one exception: an entity you pick by hand is shown even if it is a configuration or diagnostic one, the same way action targets behave.

In YAML the example from the pull request looks like this:

strategy:
  type: entities
  entity_types:
    - light
  target:
    floor_id: ground_floor
  group_by: area

This puts every light on the ground floor into one section, split by room. Swap light for batteries and the target for a few areas, and you get a battery overview that picks up each new sensor without editing the dashboard.

No more YAML-only start

The device section that landed a few days earlier, which shows the entities of a single device, could only be added in YAML. The second pull request changes the "create section" button in the sections view. It now asks whether you want a manual section, an automatic one, or the section you copied to the clipboard. Automatic sections are listed as tiles with a live preview, and the section editor opens before anything is added to the view. The entities section previews itself with the lights of the area that has the most lights.

The dialog has room for more. It lists the built-in sections, currently "Common controls", "Device" and "Entities", and a separate group of community sections, meaning custom section strategies that register themselves in the frontend.

Where it helps and where it does not

Generated sections suit overviews that change often: lights by room, all batteries, every window sensor on a label. Because the layout is generated, the tile order and look follow the strategy's rules. For a carefully arranged room view, hand-built cards remain the better tool, and you can mix both on one dashboard.