home-assistant
2025.12 removed capacity to hide or forbid dashboard access to some control.
Checklist
- [x] I have updated to the latest available Home Assistant version.
- [x] I have cleared the cache of my browser.
- [x] I have tried a different browser to see if it is related to my browser.
- [x] I have tried reproducing the issue in safe mode to rule out problems with unsupported custom resources.
Describe the issue you are experiencing
2025.12 update has removed the capacity to lock out part of the dashboard / devices / entities that was available before.
Side note:
Before being answered that there is no Role based access in HA and that everything was always accessible through search interface (which I know...). I just want to highlight:
- first that some filtering WAS available before, and is not available anymore
- and second that it is slightly different to have a search capacity and an active button in an interface.
If you take the example of children, this is completely different to have in the area "child room" the active control of a critical automation (climate control for example) and the same automation accessible through search. The probability of mishandling is not the same.
Up to 2025.11 We were able to:
- filter the displayed areas of the overview dashboard, hide unassigned entities
- take control of the overview dashboard to set a custom dashboard instead
- limit the view of some dashboards to admin only
- define a per view / per user control of our custom dashboards
Thus, non admin users, even when playing in their companion app settings, had no capability to display the entities control that the admin had carefully hidden (unless deliberately searching for the entity in search tool).
In 2025.12:
- You cannot remove the capacity to access to Home and its sub views or panels (areas subviews, light, climate and security panels). They should be hidden by default, but sometimes are not, and can be visible by just playing with settings in companion app.
- You cannot filter in those views what should be shown and what should be hidden (either by area or by device/entity, whatever).
- Even un-assigning an entity does not remove it from those dashboards panel (at least for light, climate and security)
Thus since 2025.12 update, dashboards exposing critical control buttons are available for all users (hopefully hidden, but not always) and by one clic in an interface, a kid can for example deactivate a critical automation.
The only way I found to remove direct control for example to automations is by un-assigning them from areas. Same for all boolean controls or helpers, you have to remove them from areas if you want to remove dashboard control. Painful and not expected from a "dashboard improvement" especially when you took time to assign all your entities...
This is for me a major regression introduced by the latest version in term of security and access to control.
Describe the behavior you expected
Some controls should be created or re-introduced:
- We should have the capability to restrict display of dashboards to some user (admin only for example, user based would be a plus) even for automaticaly generated dashboards.
- We should have a capability to hide some part of Home dashboard: for example hide some Areas, (allowing to create "safe areas" for critical entities, like automations) => this capability was lost going from overview to home
- We should have a capability to restrict some entities to appear in light/climate/security (new need generated by this new panel, that you can not filter and not suppress)
Steps to reproduce the issue
- update to 2025.12
- open Home dashboard
- clic randomly on any automation available in an area
What version of Home Assistant Core has the issue?
2025.12.2
What was the last working version of Home Assistant Core?
2025.11.3
In which browser are you experiencing the issue?
All of them
Which operating system are you using to run this browser?
Window (not related)
State of relevant entities
Problem-relevant frontend configuration
JavaScript errors shown in your browser console/inspector
Additional information
No response
@karwosts sorry but this was not a duplicate for me.
I did never not ask for remove it, disable it or delete it !
I just asked to bring back the capacity to chose "who can access to what"...
Home is a very valid access point for Admin user, not for a child.
I want to keep access to it, have full access to all the home screens if it make sense for me, but not for my kids who have a dedicated dashboards. Or I want to be capable to filter what is available in Home and its Panels.
Will go to https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/28361 to try express that view... but I fear the subject is taken a little bit too emotionaly in many places... I did not wanted to be part of the "home bashing", and tried to be constructive (Moreover I like Home and Area dashboards from the beginning and tried to adopt and promote them in forums and tutos...)
But the latest release really bring some regressions. And not admit it is from my view a mistake, and moreover it may discourage people to use Home dashboard if released when not mature... (My personal opinion.)
I just asked to bring back the capacity to chose "who can access to what"...
Has never existed.
I just redirected as trying to get all the related discussion into one place, where this has already been discussed. If you feel that strongly about it I'll step back and let someone else handle this, but personally I don't think either of these tickets really belong here.
Has never existed.
I disagree on this point for dashboards.
Now any non-admin can access to "Home" and its associated new panel with a few clic in the companion UI, this was not the case before.
Moreover, up to 2025.11 if you filtered overview (or changed it by a custom dashboard by "taking control") and had your dashboard filtered by admin / non admin view.
The only access was search. And it was accessible but the probability of mishandling was not the same.
Has never existed.
An simple example to show you are wrong: Automations were not de-activable with a fully default state overview dashboard, whereas they are accessible to Home if you attribute them to an area. (Try it if you do not believe me, only access was through search, not from a button into an interface).
I just redirected as trying to get all the related discussion into one place, where this has already been discussed. If you feel that strongly about it I'll step back and let someone else handle this, but personally I don't think either of these tickets really belong here.
I do not know which is best and I trust you on the best choice to do, you are more familiar with HA, frontend and Github subtilities than me!.
I did not wanted to mix what I thought was constructive proposal (allow to decide which type of user can view which dashboard or introduce similar filtering capability as overview) with some "Home dashboard bashing" (remove this horrible dashboard I do not want to see as I have read in too many comments) which was obviously not my message.
Example of think I did not wanted to be mixed with, with the issue reported just before mine:
Home is a very valid access point for Admin user, not for a child.
I completely disagree on that point. Home panel is built for every user. It doesn't expose device configuration and it's built for everyone.My wife is not admin of my instance but want to be able to control every device.
We are aware about the different use case for guest, children, etc... But, disable the access of page is RBAC about it's not a priority on the roadmap.
There is still possibility to not use this dashboard if it doesn't fit your need :
- it's hidden from the sidebar by default for every user (if not, please open an issue if you are able to reproduce it)
- you can now set a default dashboard for everyone (which wasn't the case in
2025.11)
To give you the technical reason of these limitations : The home, light, security, climate and energy page are not dashboards but panels. And panels never supported access control. We did not want to introduce the same access control as the dashboard one because we want to do it properly in the future (e.g. restriction by user, default visibility in sidebar...).
So, to answer to the issue, we will not replicate the dashboard access control to panel and it will cause more migration in the future.
I really think that just having it hidden from the sidebar should fix the issue for your kids.
I understand that there are technical limitations and I do not challenge them.
Regarding this:
My wife is not admin of my instance but want to be able to control every device.
Same here, but she does not want to control all entities and wants to be preserved from the "internal junk" that does not require user interface and should be kept for Admins!
An illustration below:
This is the "staircase" area of my house in Home:
The interface can be confusing between lights (top left) and automation (bottom center).
One could easily in one clic de-activate light-automation in an attempt to control light
I did not anticipate when migrating to 2025.12 that I would have to rename or relocate my automations which are now immediately accessible, in place they should'nt and have a name that could be misleading to control an entity.
The previous iteration of the dashboard (namely the area dashboard) was flexible here, offering to chose which is visible or not: and here to hide the actions:
This need was thus covered at that time, even without any role base access or user filtering. The admin had the capacity to decide what should be dashboard controlled and what should not.
There is a major difference between accessibility to things and interface reducing the risk of errors.
Another exemple of this issue:
All bottom areas (not attributed to a floor) are "technical areas" that I created in order to filter the overview dashboard and keep there only things I wanted the user not to interact with. (I did that because I wanted to keep an eye on "automaticaly generated dashboards" to advise beginners on their use and not always direct people to custom dashboard...)
Exemple with the first one: "software ressource area" :
Filtering all this would be usefull in my case, as nobody need to interact with these entities except the admin...
This was available in the area dashboard but is lost in Home dashboard:
This was available in the overview dashboard, but is lost in Home dashboard:
The "quick and dirty" solution for this will be to delete those "technical areas" and goes back to a lot of un-assigned entities, but is it the way Home assistant dev advertise to handle entities ??
The only solution I can find is to assign entities to area only when usefull for display in dashboard, and not for "sorting things" to "where" they belong. I am not sure this is the role of area to put there only displayable things.
Moreover, this is a solution for area subview, but not for light, climate, security panels, for which there is no way to filter entities controlled.
In doubt I looked in the doc for Areas: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/organizing/areas/
An area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world of your home.
and later :
You can assign an area to multiple items at once in the automation, scene, script, and device pages.
To my understanding, it doesn't make sense to have automations in dashboard direct control, they are here to avoid dashboard control... For Scenes yes! For Scripts it would be on a case by case basis...
And concerning dashboards:
Reordering areas on built-in dashboards Follow these steps to rearrange floors and areas on the built-in dashboards (such as Overview, Lights, and Security).
But in the doc there is no mention that explain that since 2025.12 you should not assign things to areas if you don not want to display them in Home dashboard... https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/28561 is even proposing to set area above description in automation save interface. Are you really thinking that automation tiles deserved a control by anybody in the house ?
Following my previous post, I tried to improve the situation and I made some "cleaning": All automations and scripts removed from "normal" areas and moved to "ressource - automation" technical area.
This practically removed the risk for anybody (including me) to clic on a "light named" tile controlling an automation instead of the light tile itself. Or in the same kind of error, disable the automation managing the climate which was in the same page as the climate itself... My automation are also sorted with categories and/or labels, thus it is not a big loss not to have them in physical area of the entities they control, sorting is somehow maintained.
But I still have a small number of "technical" areas full of things that are not for everybody to deal with in these "technical areas" and that are accessible to everybody in the house.
Again, as said in post above, the "quick and dirty" solution for this will be to delete those "technical areas" and goes back to a lot of un-assigned entities.
This could solve the issue for area subview to hide entities, you can un-assign them from areas.
But still there is no way to hide an entity that is displayed in the panels (for example a group of light or cover, a camera, etc...) which was previously possible in overview and in area. Thus even un-assigning entity from areas let some entities (the one avail in panels) not hide-able by the admin.
With this comes this additional question:
When clicking on the header "automation" shortcut, this lead me to the automation menu. With non admin access, I get a waiting circle then goes back to default dashboard.
Same behavior is obtained when clicking on a device link in the area subview: link to device configuration if admin, back to default dashboard if non admin. This link is pointing to /config/devices/device/device_number
Very practical for an Admin ! This is a little bit in contradiction with your response when I said : "Home is a very valid access point for Admin user, not for a child."
I completely disagree on that point. Home panel is built for every user. It doesn't expose device configuration and it's built for everyone.
Apparently Home dashboard do expose device configuration shortcuts ! And do not misinterpret the point: This is a very good feature for admin user, and moreover, as there is a "failsafe" mecanism with broken links heading back to default dashboard for non admin, there is no drawback for non admins
Some changes are on-going there, my post might be outdated in next version: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/28512 I hope it will not remove this practical link for admin...
To my view the only thing missing is the capacity to hide/show part of the area or entities to the people that do not need to access or control them...
And again I do not request to suppress home dashboard ! I want it to be good and useful for every user in my house.
If you step back and look to the timeline:
- from 2025.4 prospective design for Home (namely area) has been progressively introducing a practical way to display/hide the areas/ entities you wanted far better and more customisable that overview (thus, from a user perspective, the need was understood and the feasibility was achieved, it was even coded and available)
- 2025.9 was introducing home, with a nicer front page, interresting subview architecture, but for the time being no filtering.
- 2025.11 was the last version still allowing to hide part of the controls to non admin (except in search) => you were still capable to have a filtered default dashboard for every non admin user and an unfiltered dashboard for admin, based on an automatic structure (overview or area or Home depending your choice). 2025.11 was great and was making me thinking of discarding my custom dashboard !
- 2025.12 by "forcing" Home has exposed to everybody many controls, and some control exposed are totally non-filterable if in panels (and this was not explained to users, whereas in some cases it could be seen as a big security/safety breach and a kind of breaking change)
- I hope a future version will provide a way to use Home for the best (for example provide an area/entity filter, similar to the area dashboard one, allowing to have a different display for admin and non admin => this would be an improvement compared to the past allowing everybody to use the same dashboard, with supplemental controls and shortcuts for admins)
( Should we have had the last bullet before the previous one, nobody would have complained about Home dashboard except the usual 10% that always complain for any change.)
@piitaya , if I may, a very last comment (because I think this one is just a comment) is that we have also lost with the panels the previous capacity to navigate between subviews that I was talking to here: https://github.com/orgs/home-assistant/discussions/530
In previous version of Home dashboard, there was a cross navigation possibility from light/security/climate to areas subviews and from area subview to lights/security/climate.
This is lost in the current version of the Home dashboard (in the panels only). There is still the possibility to navigate from area subviews to panel, but not possibility to navigate from panels to area subviews.
This is a pity when you think about using this dashboard as a "template" for your own custom because you do not have the subview structure anymore...
I understand that this is probably linked with the transition from dashboard subview to panels that you spoke about in your message.
I do not know if it will be possible to bring this back. (especially the links inside panel going to subviews could be addressing different dashboards, like for energy panel and thus only the "back" button could bring you back to the right dashboard)
Regarding this whole github issue as such, I have the impression that dialog is somehow broken on this topic, which I hope I am wrong.
I do not deny that a lot of work has been done on the subject. But if you look to the facts, for the user, some functionalities where lost going from 2025.11 to 2025.12. There may be good technical reasons behind this, but they are not obvious for users.
And when there is a attempt from user to provide a constructive and detailled feedback, the reaction is a little bit too emotional or very partial. I you read back my first message:
- in the 2025.12 behavior reported:
In 2025.12:
- You cannot remove the capacity to access to Home and its sub views or panels (areas subviews, light, climate and security panels). They should be hidden by default, but sometimes are not, and can be visible by just playing with settings in companion app.
- You cannot filter in those views what should be shown and what should be hidden (either by area or by device/entity, whatever).
- Even un-assigning an entity does not remove it from those dashboards panel (at least for light, climate and security)
- in the behavior proposal:
Describe the behavior you expected Some controls should be created or re-introduced:
- We should have the capability to restrict display of dashboards to some user (admin only for example, user based would be a plus) even for automaticaly generated dashboards.
- We should have a capability to hide some part of Home dashboard: for example hide some Areas, (allowing to create "safe areas" for critical entities, like automations) => this capability was lost going from overview to home
- We should have a capability to restrict some entities to appear in light/climate/security (new need generated by this new panel, that you can not filter and not suppress)
Each time, only the first point was commented and reacted, not the two others. With only answers being:
-
(this) "has never existed" (which I do not approve, there was way not to expose everything before - except from search - and they are some documented examples in all messages above)
-
"To answer to the issue, we will not replicate the dashboard access control to panel" (Ok fair, but what about the rest of the problematic. issue was not only "access control", it was since the beginning and in the title "access to control"...)
-
"There is still possibility to not use this dashboard if it doesn't fit your need" and "it's hidden from the sidebar by default for every user" (OK fair, but one long clic on "Home assistant" on the top of the sidebar in the interface of any non admin and you can display home and panels, plus it is not the purpose to define things and then say don't use it to people who try to use it...)
-
you could even have added => use browser mod, register your non admin user browser and you will have full control on the sidebar (which finally would have been a constructive way forward proposing solutions, not denying the issue)
Thus sorry if this issue opened a pain point. That was not the purpose. The purpose was to explain what I perceive as a regressions and the possibilities I had in mind to improve the situation. I believe that closing the eyes on issues will not lead to something good.
And regarding the two last points on the initial post 'expected behaviour', asking to re-introduce previously existing ways to choose what would be displayed (and thus controlled), they were not commented nor answered :
=> If removing all display filtering options (which were available in overview and area, which are the previous iteration of this default dashboard) is a strong design choice and not a "remain to do" in the Home dashboard, then please say it clearly and feel free to close this github issue as it will go nowhere.
=> if this filtering option might appear in the future, as it was existing in all automatic dashboards before (overview and area) then this github issue is legitimate (but maybe useless because already on a todo list...)
Regarding the "Home" dashboard, I think the topic deserved a proper documentation with the good way to use this new Home dashboard, I do not know in which format, but it would help to adopt it to understand the philo below its use. I think 2025.12 introduction lacked support on this domain (and this explains some reactions). This reminds me of 2025.1 and 2025.2 on the backups...
Personally, I would not have structured the same my entities if I had started with a Home dashboard instead of overview, then Area, then Home... But having played with areas, then Home in previous version, and having advertised them in french forum and tutorial, I have to admit that this release was for me a disappointment with (to my view) a lot of the things I liked being removed and with no clear understanding on the reason why, nor obvious main functionalities added for user (appart from the ability to define a default dashboard). And sorry but I keep being concerned to now have accessible dashboards (or panels) allowing controls (please do not answer me that energy panel was accessible since the beginning, they are no control there, only display...) that an admin can not filter to prevent non admin to use, which was not the case in previous version.
And this answer is for me symptomatic of the issue we now face with home dashboard:
I completely disagree on that point. Home panel is built for every user. It doesn't expose device configuration and it's built for everyone.My wife is not admin of my instance but want to be able to control every device.
We are aware about the different use case for guest, children, etc... But, disable the access of page is RBAC about it's not a priority on the roadmap.
There is still possibility to not use this dashboard if it doesn't fit your need :
- it's hidden from the sidebar by default for every user (if not, please open an issue if you are able to reproduce it)
- you can now set a default dashboard for everyone (which wasn't the case in 2025.11)
My personal view is that:
- Home dashboard is being built for every user, but is not ready yet and missing some mandatory features to be ready for every user.
- You probably had to move on to a new architecture for development purpose, which I do not challenge, but the user can not be aware of these internal constrains if it is not explained in the delivery notes, and moreover, any associated limitations should be exposed (for example a note saying: as long as filtering is not in place, un-assign from your areas the entities you do not want to display or control, and keep in mind that panels are unfiltered too) This would allow people that have access control in place (for kids, for guest or whatever) to decide what to do with this update depending their constrains.
To say it differently, this version was somehow an unannounced breaking change. And I get the impression that when somebody tries to point some facts the answer is: take it or leave it. I hope I am wrong.
Anyway @piitaya , @karwosts and all devs having contributed to the frontend since months, a big thank you for the huge work already performed and the remaining one.
Another thank you for the time taken here to answer and your explanation on the technical challenges. It is always appreciated to have this kind of feedback, even if not in the expected direction, and I hope to continue discussion, here or elsewhere...
Following group light issue investigations that I opened in parallel, I have understood that hiding an entity was only for automatic dashboards and is different from enabling.
Setting all entities you want to prevent control as invisible is a partial solution.
May I propose two possible improvements to at least partially solve this github issue:
- capability to define if an area is visible or not (and not just an entity)
- improve this visibility parameter with a two level status: visible for all, visible for admin only, or hidden.
If you add the capacity to hide the search interface for non admin you have a pragmatic RBAC with two roles only...