On 16 October 2026 Home Assistant gained three new Core triggers so automations no longer need template sensors to notice a version change or a pending restart. The work lands in the 2026.11 development tree. Franck Nijhof merged homeassistant.updated in the afternoon and, a few hours later, homeassistant.restart_required and homeassistant.host_reboot_required with matching conditions.
After an update
The homeassistant.updated trigger fires once after start when the running version differs from the previous run. Trigger data includes from_version and to_version. A plain restart with the same version does nothing, and a brand-new install never fires. Home Assistant already kept the last version in .HA_VERSION; the trigger reads that file instead of asking every automation to invent its own comparison.
That covers the common jobs people wired with template helpers: send a notification that the server moved to a new release, re-enable a brittle integration, or wait a few minutes and then run a health check. The trigger uses a distinct icon from the older homeassistant event trigger so the UI does not confuse the two.
When a restart or reboot is pending
The restart and reboot triggers are the automation side of a larger epic that turns scattered repair notices into two runtime flags: home_assistant_restart_required and host_reboot_required. Anything that needs a Home Assistant restart can set the first flag; on Home Assistant OS the Supervisor sets the second when the host itself must reboot. Neither flag clears until the restart or reboot actually happens.
homeassistant.restart_required and homeassistant.host_reboot_required fire when the matching flag goes from unset to set. The restart trigger passes trigger.sources with the integrations that asked. Because the restart flag latches for the whole run, that trigger fires once per run; the reboot trigger can fire again if Supervisor raises the flag a second time. A flag that was already set when you turned the automation on does not fire - use the matching condition for that case. The legacy platform: homeassistant trigger keeps working beside the new ones.
Together with the frontend bar that the same epic adds, owners get one place to see that something needs a restart, and automations can act on that state without parsing a list of repairs.
Timing
Both changes target Home Assistant 2026.11. The restart and reboot triggers sit on the 2026.11.0b0 milestone; documentation for them is open against the next docs branch. Until the beta, the practical path is a development or nightly install, or waiting for the November release notes.