Home Assistant 2025.12: New Labs Feature, Smarter Dashboards, and Key Platform Updates

With the new 2025.12 update, Home Assistant is now available for download. This update brings more than cosmetic improvements. Instead, the developer community introduces several major innovations that pave the way for a new phase: smarter automations, clearer user interfaces, and significantly expanded energy and water monitoring.

A central innovation in version 2025.12 is the introduction of the new Home Assistant Labs section. Labs serves as a sandbox for features that are technically “ready” but not yet finalized for full integration. Users can enable these experimental features — optionally with a backup — and disable them again at any time.

The first included Labs feature is the integrated “Winter mode”: a purely visual effect that adds falling snowflakes to the dashboard — nice to have, but optional. Additional Labs features focus on automations. In the future, automations can be triggered using semantically meaningful conditions such as “when a light is turned on” or “when the heating starts.” These new purpose-specific triggers and conditions partly replace the earlier model where states had to be configured manually.

A practical improvement: selecting areas, devices, and actions is now done via a new “target-first” picker, structured clearly by floor → area → device → action.

Dashboard and Interface Improvements

With version 2025.12, Home Assistant also receives upgrades to the dashboard system, improving both organization and flexibility. According to the release notes, administrators can now define a system-wide default dashboard. Users can override this in their personal profiles.

Another enhancement is the manual sorting of floors and areas via drag & drop. This order is reflected across all built-in dashboards. The former “Areas” dashboard has been removed from the UI, while the previously experimental “Home” dashboard is now integrated as a regular dashboard type.

The Home dashboard also gains a redesigned sidebar and an optimized layout. One limitation: Favorites may be lost during the transition and need to be reassigned. Power users will appreciate the new undo/redo function in the dashboard editor, allowing up to 75 steps to be reversed or restored.

Energy and Water Monitoring: Real-Time and More Detail

The energy dashboard has also been expanded in version 2025.12. For the first time, users can view real-time power measurements (watts), in addition to energy consumption and feed-in values (kWh). This helps assess how individual devices are currently impacting the power grid.

Support for downstream water meters has also been added. These allow separate consumption tracking — for example, garden irrigation, water softeners, or pools. A new water Sankey chart is available for visualization, similar to the existing energy Sankey layout.

If multiple resource types such as energy, water, gas, or power are configured, Home Assistant automatically splits the dashboard into tabs to improve clarity.

New Integrations: More Devices and Data Sources

The list of new integrations in Home Assistant 2025.12 is extensive. Among them:

• Airobot – local control of smart thermostats and underfloor heating
• Anglian Water – integration of smart water meters including cost tracking
• Backblaze B2 – cloud backup target for Home Assistant backups
• EnergyID – export of home data for analytics and benchmarking
• Essent – dynamic electricity and gas pricing (NL)
• Google Air Quality and Google Weather – enhanced air quality and weather data
• Philips Hue BLE – control of Hue lamps via Bluetooth without a bridge
• Victron BLE, Hanna (pool water quality), Saunum (sauna), and more

These integrations broaden the range of supported devices and simplify the inclusion of systems that were previously difficult to connect.

Backward-Incompatible Changes: Migration Recommended

With this release, Home Assistant ends support for several older installation types and architectures. According to the official announcement, Home Assistant Core (classic Python installation) and Home Assistant Supervised will no longer receive updates, including security patches.

Support for 32-bit platforms such as i386, armhf, and armv7 is also discontinued. Users should migrate to a modern 64-bit platform such as Home Assistant OS.

Some integrations were additionally removed or reworked due to discontinued services, protocols, or hardware. Details can be found in the changelog.

Conclusion

Home Assistant 2025.12 not only introduces many new features but also marks a strategic shift. With Labs, developers open a window into upcoming innovations. Dashboards become more flexible, automations more intuitive, and energy and water monitoring more powerful. In exchange, older installation methods are retired — a necessary step to keep the platform stable and future-ready.

Summary (tl;dr)

• Home Assistant Labs sandbox for experimental features incl. Winter mode and semantic automation triggers.
• Dashboard upgrade with global defaults, drag-and-drop sorting, new layout, sidebar, and undo/redo.
• Energy & water enhancements incl. real-time power, downstream meters, and new Sankey chart.
• New integrations: Airobot, Anglian Water, Backblaze B2, Google Air Quality/Weather, Philips Hue BLE.
• Backward incompatibility: support ends for Core, Supervised, and all 32-bit systems → migration required.