Home Assistant 2026.8 landed at the start of the month, and most of the coverage led with the port 80 change. Worth clearing that up, because a lot of the write-ups made it sound like a breaking change for everyone and it isn’t one.
The port 80 thing, accurately
New installations of Home Assistant OS now default to port 80, so the local address is just homeassistant.local with no :8123 on the end.
If you already run Home Assistant, nothing changes. Home Assistant’s own release notes say it directly: nothing changes and there is nothing you need to do. Your existing install keeps the port it’s on. You can change it in the UI if you want, and there’s automatic rollback if the new port doesn’t work.
So if you’ve got a reverse proxy or firewall rules pointed at 8123, they keep working. Several write-ups implied otherwise.
The changes that actually break things
The real breaking changes are integration-specific and less widely reported:
- UniFi Protect now requires Protect 7.1 or newer, and detection scores are gone.
- Robot vacuums lose the
battery_levelproperty. Use the battery sensor entities instead. - Volvo On Call is removed entirely. There’s a newer Volvo integration to migrate to.
- Paperless-ngx now needs server 2.19 or later.
- Gardena Bluetooth standardized its
activation_reasonsensor values.
The UniFi Protect one is the most likely to catch a homelab, since plenty of Protect installs sit on whatever version shipped with the console and don’t get touched again.
The rest of it
The release theme is making Home Assistant usable without being technical. Around 43 instances of “advanced” and “expert” labels got removed, on the reasoning that a feature should be described by what it does rather than by who’s assumed to be capable of using it. That’s a small change that says something about where the project is heading.
Elsewhere: you can rename entity IDs and control their ordering now, integrations keep separate device entries instead of merging them, and there are new automation triggers for vibration detection and moon phases. Templates with a numeric result run up to 40% faster, and dashboard templates can be cached.
Where we land
Nothing here forces an upgrade, and nothing here should scare you off one either. Check whether you’re running UniFi Protect below 7.1 before you pull the trigger, and otherwise this is a quality-of-life release.
The port 80 default is the right call for new users. Making someone remember an arbitrary port number to reach the thing running in their own house was always a bad first impression.
Sources: Home Assistant’s 2026.8 release notes, the full 2026.8 changelog.