ESPHome 2026.1.0 Brings Improved Security, Wi-Fi Roaming, and Far Better Support for the ESP8266

The ESPHome project has announced its January 2026 release, sensibly named ESPHome 2026.1.0 — and bringing with it what maintainers say is one of the firmware's most highly-demanded features, automatic Wi-Fi roaming, plus considerably improved support for the Espressif ESP8266 family.

"ESPHome 2026.1.0 delivers one of the most requested features: automatic WiFi roaming," the ESPHome maintainers write in the project's latest release notes. "Devices now switch to better access points after connecting, solving the problem of devices getting stuck on distant APs [Access Points] after power outages or AP reboots."

Originally designed to provide an easy way to turn Espressif's ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers into smart-home devices and since expanded to other microcontroller families, ESPHome is these days part of the Home Assistant family — and receives regular updates, including this first release of 2026. The headline feature of Wi-Fi roaming is designed to improve reliability for both stationary and mobile ESPHome devices, but it's far from the only change in the update.

The project's maintainers promise improvements in non-ASCII entity name encoding, improved security including mandatory SHA256 authentication for over-the-air updates, new sensor support, a shift to ESP-IDF for compatible microcontrollers that delivers a 40% reduction in binary size, and lower memory usage.

These latter two combine to upgrade the status of the low-cost Espressif ESP8266 microcontroller, the team notes. "On ESP8266, available heap increased from under 10k to over 30k in realistic configurations," the developers write of the new version. "Devices that were unstable became reliable, and devices that could not be updated regained headroom. ESP8266 is no longer a platform we warn users away from. It can continue serving existing deployments well into the future, even as new projects naturally gravitate toward ESP32."

The full release notes are available on the ESPHome website; the release itself is available on GitHub under a combination of the permissive MIT and reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.