On Home Assistant OS, every Home Assistant update still waits for someone to open the update panel and press Install. That is about to change for patch releases. On 16 October 2026 the first two pieces of "Automatic Home Assistant updates for patch releases" were merged into the development branch, and the plan for the rest is public in the project's epic tracker.

What the plan says

The epic was opened on 8 September. Its reasoning is simple: patch releases come out weekly and contain only bug fixes and security fixes, yet users who never check the update panel keep running versions whose known problems were already fixed.

The decisions listed in the epic:

  • Only patch releases of the running monthly version are installed automatically, for example 2026.10.1 to 2026.10.2. Monthly releases such as 2026.11 still need a click, and apps (add-ons) and the operating system are not part of the feature.
  • It works only on Home Assistant OS, on the stable channel. On Container, or on the beta and dev channels, the feature reports itself as unavailable.
  • New installations have it on by default. Existing installations start with it off and get a repair issue that offers to turn it on, keep it off or open the settings.
  • By default Home Assistant waits 3 days after it first sees a new version (the choices are 0, 1, 3, 7 or 14 days) and installs between 03:00 and 05:00, every day of the week. The window and the weekdays can be changed, and a window may cross midnight.
  • The backup follows the same rules as a manual update: the existing "back up before updating" option decides whether a backup is made.
  • The install uses the existing Supervisor update, which already makes a backup, checks that the new version is healthy and rolls back on failure. A failed or rolled-back update creates a repair issue and that version is skipped.
  • A switch entity will let automations pause automatic updates.

Since Home Assistant cannot read release dates from the version file, it records the moment it first saw each version and counts the wait from there.

What was merged on 16 October

Franck Nijhof's first pull request (#186886) adds the settings and that first-seen record to the Supervisor integration (hassio). It does not install anything yet. The scheduled install itself is in a separate pull request (#186923) that was still open at the time of writing, along with one that remembers skipped versions (#186912). The settings page in the frontend is also still to come.

The second merged change (#186894) is useful even without automatic updates. A new homeassistant.updated trigger fires once after start when the Home Assistant version has changed, with from_version and to_version in the trigger data. It does not fire on an ordinary restart or the first start of a fresh install, a downgrade counts as a change too, and it works on every installation type, including Container. Until now this needed a template sensor comparing versions. A later task will add whether the update was automatic.

Neither the epic nor the pull requests give a release date. Code merged into the development branch normally ships in the next monthly release, which would be 2026.11, but the scheduled install is not merged yet.