A new lorawan integration was merged into Home Assistant's development branch on 14 October 2026, and its documentation went into the next branch of the website the same day. It is the base layer for native LoRaWAN support. A follow-up merged on 17 October exposes LoRaWAN devices, connections and gateway receptions through admin WebSocket APIs. The code owner is Paulus Schoutsen (balloob), Home Assistant's founder, who laid out the design in the architecture repository on 5 October.

Why LoRaWAN, and why a separate layer

LoRaWAN is a low-power, long-range network protocol, used mostly in industry. The proposal names two uses at home. One is a large property: LoRaWAN covers long distances, and there are plenty of outdoor sensors for it, such as soil moisture probes spread across a garden. The other is The Things Network, a free network of gateways that covers, for example, most of the Netherlands. A LoRaWAN leak detector on a boat could report a leak to Home Assistant through it.

Until now Home Assistant had no native support. People bridged ChirpStack, a popular open-source network server, into MQTT, or used products such as YoLink that hide LoRaWAN behind the maker's own hub. Like MQTT, LoRaWAN defines no common payload format, so the receiving side has to know how each device encodes its messages.

How the pieces fit

The design has three layers. The lorawan integration keeps track of connections to network servers. Connection integrations, one per server type, configure a server and register it. Vendor integrations then use every registered connection and decode their own devices' messages. A new library, lorawan-connection, gives all three a shared format, and its ChirpStack and The Things Stack backends are optional. Each uplink carries the RSSI and SNR from every gateway that received it.

On its own, lorawan connects no devices. That takes a connection integration and a vendor integration, and those are still pull requests:

  • ChirpStack, connecting ChirpStack tenants and selected applications.
  • The Things Network, with region presets, custom servers and application selection. It is still a draft for local testing, and it would rename the existing integration of that name to "The Things Network (Cloud Storage)".
  • SenseCAP, for Seeed's S2101 to S2107 and S2120 sensors, with measurements and battery readings.

When

Code on the development branch normally ships in the next monthly release, which is 2026.11. That covers the lorawan base. None of the integrations that make it usable had been merged by 17 October, so whether they make the same release is open.