Home Assistant 2026.5 Brings "First-Class" Support for Controlling Sub-Gigahertz Devices
The Home Assistant smart home automation platform has announced its 2026.5 release — and the new version brings with it "first-class" support for controlling devices based on proprietary radio-frequency (RF) protocols.
"Last release, we welcomed infrared as a first-class citizen of Home Assistant, opening the door to all those TVs, air conditioners, and other appliances still controlled by their little IR remote," Home Assistant's Franck Nijhof explains. This release continues that story with another old-school protocol: radio frequency (RF). Think about all the RF-controlled devices already living in your home: motorized blinds and curtains, garage door openers, ceiling fans, wireless wall switches, RF outlets, doorbells, and yes, those holiday string lights. Most of them haven’t had a great way into your smart home, because they don’t speak Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Matter. They speak RF, and only RF. There have always been workarounds and custom integrations to bridge some of them, but with this release, Home Assistant speaks RF natively."
The new Radio Frequency integration is built on the existing Infrared integration, with support for the Broadlink RM4 Pro or any ESPHome device with a compatible low-cost sub-gighertz transmitter like the CC1101. When set up, transmissions can be triggered from any RF-compatible integration — with two available at launch: Honeywell String Lights and the Novy Cooker Hood.
"Like infrared, this is about more than a single new feature," Nijhof says. "A large chunk of perfectly good RF-controlled hardware out there has no smart home story at all. By giving Home Assistant a standard way to talk to RF devices, every new consumer integration built on top instantly works with every transmitter integration. Add a new ESPHome RF proxy somewhere in the house, and your blinds, your fan, and your string lights all just work."
The new release also brings with it serial proxy support, allowing ESPHome devices to communicate with devices over a wired serial port. "[You can] connect to receivers, projectors, or other AV gear over RS-232 from anywhere on your network," Nijhof explains, "[or] read your smart meter's P1 port from the meter cabinet, even if your Home Assistant server lives upstairs in a closet. Instead of replacing perfectly good serial-only equipment with newer Wi-Fi versions, you can keep using what you already have. That energy meter, that older AV receiver, that industrial sensor: they all just work, over the network."
While available now, the serial functionality is described as "on the technical side" — requiring users to build their own ESPHome-based serial interface, write a YAML configuration file, flash custom firmware, and connect it to the target device. "We think that’s okay," Nijhof says, "because this release is the foundational milestone that makes everything else possible. The plumbing is now in place across Home Assistant, ESPHome, and the integrations that need it. From here, we (and the broader community) can build on top of this with friendlier setup flows, ready-made hardware, and pre-built ESPHome configurations."
Other new features include a new Maintenance dashboard, a Security dashboard activity log, a shortcut card for custom dashboards, "for a while" capabilities in automations, new and improved integrations, improved support for smart vacuums and lawn mowers, and reworked templating documentation designed to make the platform more accessible. The release does, however, come with some breaking changes: the LANnouncer integration has been removed following the delisting of its Android app last year, while there are changes to some triggers and conditions, webhook operation, the Supervisor integration, and integrations for Gardena and Ring devices; the pilight integration, meanwhile, has been entirely disabled.
More information is available on the
along with links for upgrading or installing the new release afresh; source code is, as always, available on
under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.