Naming things in Home Assistant, shaped by your feedback

Just before the 2026.4 release, we pulled a change to entity naming in Home Assistant. You’d tested it in beta, told us what you didn’t like, and we listened. It took a few extra months, but we believe it’s now in a better place. We’ve filled the gaps you found, including screens that didn’t show enough context. We’ve also added child devices, which give each part of a device – like sockets on a power strip – its own name and area. Crucially, your entity IDs, automations, scripts, scenes, and dashboards will keep working. What is changing from tomorrow’s 2026.11 release is that naming in Home Assistant will be simpler: you’ll name each device and entity for what it actually is, and Home Assistant will add the context around it. The first place you’ll likely notice this is on your dashboards and other screens. They will build each name from its parts, such as the area, device, and entity name, which means some names will include more context than before. We know many of you spend hours getting your names just right. Most will carry over the way you expect. Some will look different: particularly any entity names that don’t currently start with their device name. Further down, we explain why, and how to tidy them up quickly. But before we go on, one thing we heard a lot during beta was that the naming terminology was confusing. Device name, entity name, friendly name, entity ID: what’s the difference? Here’s a quick guide. What’s in a name? Let’s say a smart plug powers your coffee machine, and sits in your kitchen. Area: the room/space the smart plug is in. Kitchen. Device: the physical object. Smart plug 3, or a name you give it, like Coffee machine. Entity: a thing a device can do or measure. The smart plug has three entities: a switch, a power sensor and an energy sensor. Each entity has its own name, ID, and friendly name. So for the smart plug’s power sensor: Entity name: the name of that one thing. Power. Entity ID: the fixed ID your automations use. sensor.kitchen_smart_plug_3_power. Friendly name: a state attribute that combines the device name and entity name. Older cards and templates still use this, but we are moving away from it. Smart plug 3 Power. Where naming comes from How did we end up with so many names? It all started simply enough… In the early days, Home Assistant only knew entities. There were no devices, areas, or floors, so an entity’s name had to carry all its context. To tell power sensors apart, you would name one “Kitchen coffee machine power.” The community wrote whole naming strategy guides to keep them consistent. From 2018 on, Home Assistant started adding structure around entities. Entities belonging to one physical object were grouped together as a device. Areas, floors, and labels were added to describe the layout of your home. But this structure also introduced repetition, so if you moved the coffee machine to another room, every one of its entity names was wrong. To fix this, integrations started naming each entity on its own, without the device name. An integration named an entity for what it was, such as “Power,” and Home Assistant put the device name in front to show “Smart plug 3 Power.” One gap remained: renaming an entity removed its device name. If you renamed a smart plug’s switch to “Coffee machine,” the device’s other entities might still be displayed as “Smart plug 3 Power” and “Smart plug 3 Energy.” As a result, many of you had to rename every entity manually to stay consistent. At a glance: Year What arrived What it meant for names 2013 Entities, configured in YAML One name per entity, carrying all the context 2018 Entity registry and devices Entities renamed in the UI; devices group entities 2019 Areas The area is known, but often still typed into names 2022 Entity naming for integrations Integrations name entities standalone; the device name is added in front 2024 Floors and labels More context available, still repeated in names 2026 Child devices and this migration Every name stands on its own, renamed or not Each of these steps made sense at the time, but together they left us with rules that didn’t always agree. We’ve been untangling them for several years, and this release is the next step. Where we’re heading From now on, a consistent set of rules applies everywhere in Home Assistant, from the dashboard to the settings pages. You name each thing once, for what it is: your floor is “Ground floor,” your area “Kitchen,” your device “Coffee machine,” and its entities “Power” and “Energy.” No name repeats another. Home Assistant will then show context as required: On the Kitchen’s area page, the area is already clear, so the device is listed as just “Coffee machine,” not “Kitchen coffee machine.” On the Coffee machine’s device page, the header already names the device and its area, so the entities are listed as just “Power” and “Energy.” In an entity picker that lists every power sensor in the house, each row also shows the device and area,