Quick summary: Home Assistant has confirmed a wide-ranging naming migration for the 2026.11 release. Displayed entity names will be assembled from separate floor, area, device and entity parts; ESPHome, MQTT and Z-Wave gain child-device support; and existing entity IDs are intended to remain unchanged.
The Open Home Foundation announced the change on 3 November 2026, one day before the planned Home Assistant 2026.11 stable release. It is more than a cosmetic dashboard tweak: the same naming rules are intended to appear across settings, logs, automation descriptions, voice-assistant settings, developer tools and the mobile apps.
What the new naming model changes
Home Assistant will treat a name as several pieces of context rather than one long label. A floor might be “Ground floor”, an area “Kitchen”, a device “Coffee machine” and an entity simply “Power”. The interface can then show only the parts needed in each view instead of forcing users to repeat “Kitchen coffee machine” across every entity.
Built-in dashboard cards will be able to compose a label from the entity, device, parent device, area and floor. Renaming an entity will change only its entity-name component; changing the name of the physical product means renaming the device. A new “main entity of the device” option can also make a smart plugPrice’s switch display as the device name alone.
The migration is designed not to rename existing entity IDs. That means automations, scripts, scenes and dashboards which target an ID such as sensor.kitchen_plug_power should continue to resolve the same entity. Home Assistant says exposed entities will also retain their old displayed names as voice aliases for Assist, Alexa and Google Assistant.
ESPHome child devices arrive before Matter and ZHA
For makers, the most practical addition is child-device support. A multi-socket strip can remain one parent device while each outlet becomes a separately named child device with its own area. Home Assistant says this will initially work with ESPHome, MQTT, Z-Wave, some Tuya devices and a few other integrations.
Matter and ZHA support is still in progress, so owners should not assume every multi-endpoint Thread, Matter or Zigbee product will be reorganised immediately. This is integration-level behaviour: it does not follow automatically from the ESP32PriceAliExpress price or other radio silicon inside a product.
What to check after upgrading
- Names that already begin with the device name should be shortened during migration, with Home Assistant adding the device context when it displays them.
- A custom entity name that does not begin with the device name may gain extra context and look repetitive. Renaming the device, rather than every entity, is the intended fix.
- Custom cards which still read the legacy
friendly_nameattribute may differ from built-in cards. Friendly names remain for backward compatibility, but Home Assistant plans to deprecate them later; no removal date was announced. - Templates that need a stable label should use
entity_name(),device_name()orarea_name()for the specific component required.
This naming work is separate from the headline features already covered in our Home Assistant 2026.11 beta report, including the Marketplace transition and Matter camera support. ESPHome users may also want the current ESPHome 2026.10.2 fixes before making wider platform changes.
Release status
When checked on the morning of 4 November, the public Home Assistant Core release page still listed 2026.11.0b4 as the newest 2026.11 build. The naming change is therefore confirmed for the forthcoming stable release, but that check was not evidence that the stable image had already reached every installation channel. Create a backup and read the final release notes before updating.
