The Home Assistant 2026.11 beta opened on 28 October 2026 with release 2026.11.0b0, and 2026.11.0b2 followed on 30 October. The final release is planned for Wednesday 4 November, with the release party stream at 21:00 CET. The headline item is the Marketplace, the built-in successor to HACS, which we covered when it was announced. The beta notes show the rest of the release, and much of it is about small daily problems: automations that need one exception and the question of why a light turned on by itself.

Exceptions in targets

A target can point at an area, a floor or a label, and Home Assistant finds the matching entities, including ones added later. Until now there was no way to leave something out. Turning on every light on the ground floor except the kitchen meant listing the lights one by one.

In 2026.11 you can exclude entities, devices, areas, floors and labels from a target in triggers, conditions and actions, for both automations and scripts. In the editor there is an Exclude target button next to Add target, and in YAML an exclude block with the same keys as the target. Exclusions are worked out on every run, so a new kitchen light added next month stays out without touching the automation.

Finding out why something happened

  • Action history. A new tab in Tools lists every action called in Home Assistant, with its targets, what caused it, which user and when. It is searchable and links to the trace when there is one.
  • Triggered by filter. The Activity panel can show only what a person, an automation or script, or an integration such as HomeKit or Google Assistant did. Accounts without a person, like the one Node-RED uses, count as integrations.
  • Traces that follow calls. When an automation runs a script, the trace step links straight to that script's run.
  • Live logs per integration. With debug logging on, an integration's page has a Show logs button that shows only its lines, as they arrive.
  • Deleting a time range from statistics. One bad temperature spike no longer forces you to delete the whole history. In Tools > Statistics you pick the range, preview it and remove only that.

Storage, energy and the rest

Backups and media can now go to an internal or USB drive, added under Settings > System > Storage as Local disk. Restoring no longer makes a temporary copy of the whole backup first. In the Energy dashboard, a device that reports only power in watts can be added directly, and Home Assistant offers to derive the kWh sensor for it. Gas and water flow sensors work the same way.

The AI tools grow too. Through the LLM API and MCP server, an assistant can now look up system information, call actions and reload integrations. To keep that in check, the MCP server can be limited to read-only tools.

The beta also brings support for Matter cameras, a LoRaWAN page for ChirpStack and The Things Network, Zigbee Green Power devices in ZHA and two-way camera audio as a Labs feature. The Flipr integration is removed because the company behind it was liquidated.

As always, the notes are a work in progress and features can still change or slip before 4 November.