Home Assistant 2025.5 arrives with new features

Home Assistant 2025.5 is now available for users of the open-source smart home automation software. As its name suggests, this is the fifth release from the company this year, continuing its pattern of updates at the start of each calendar month.

The 2025.5 release brings more improvements to the backup system, including the ability to set a retention policy for each backup location. A feature for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers is the ability to select from text-to-speech voice variants, with styles or tones such as “friendly” and “whisper”, allowing you to tailor announcements to different scenarios. Plus, when picking entities, the UI has improved with more context showing the device and area name.

There is now support for Z-Wave Long Range, allowing devices to communicate over longer distances, and the Z-Wave Smart Start QR scanning tool is available in the Home Assistant smartphone app. Also, users can now copy and paste YAML automation and scripts directly into the UI. On top of this, there are new integrations for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and some Miele appliances. The complete release notes for Home Assistant 2025.5 are available on the company’s website.