Home Assistant: How to Receive Update Notifications Only at Month’s End

If you prefer to hold off on Home Assistant Core updates until the end of the month for more stable point releases like .3 or .4 to avoid early bugs, the constant dashboard notifications can get annoying. With a simple routine, you can hide the update entity—the data object tracking update status—for most of the month and only unhide it starting on the 25th.

What you need

• A working Home Assistant installation
• The installed integration Spook (available via the Home Assistant Community Store, HACS)

1. Manually hide the update entity once

To make the notification disappear immediately until the end of the month, you first need to hide it manually.

1. Go to Settings > Devices & services > Entities.
2. Search for update.home_assistant_core_update and open its detail view.
3. Open the gear icon for settings and disable the entity’s visibility.

Once the entity is hidden, Home Assistant will stop prompting you with notifications. Under Settings > System > Updates, the update still remains accessible if needed, without requiring you to actively skip it.

2. Create an automation for scheduled visibility

The Spook integration provides two actions: homeassistant.hide_entity and homeassistant.unhide_entity. Using a scheduled automation, you can make the Core update visible starting on the 25th day of the month and automatically hide it again after the turn of the month (on the 1st or 2nd day).

Create a new automation under Settings > Automations & scenes > Create automation, click the three dots in the top right, and select Edit in YAML:

alias: Update notifications only at month's end
description: "Turns on Core update visibility only at the end of the month"
triggers:
  - trigger: time
    at: "01:00:00"
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: template
            value_template: "{{ now().day >= 25 }}"
        sequence:
          - action: homeassistant.unhide_entity
            data:
              entity_id:
                - update.home_assistant_core_update
        alias: Turn on visibility
      - conditions:
          - condition: template
            value_template: "{{ now().day <= 2 }}"
        sequence:
          - action: homeassistant.hide_entity
            data:
              entity_id:
                - update.home_assistant_core_update
        alias: Turn off visibility
mode: single

alias: Update notifications only at month's end
description: "Turns on Core update visibility only at the end of the month"
triggers:
  - trigger: time
    at: "01:00:00"
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: template
            value_template: "{{ now().day >= 25 }}"
        sequence:
          - action: homeassistant.unhide_entity
            data:
              entity_id:
                - update.home_assistant_core_update
        alias: Turn on visibility
      - conditions:
          - condition: template
            value_template: "{{ now().day <= 2 }}"
        sequence:
          - action: homeassistant.hide_entity
            data:
              entity_id:
                - update.home_assistant_core_update
        alias: Turn off visibility
mode: single

Save the automation afterwards.

Does it work?

You can tell it is working because the entity update.home_assistant_core_update will be marked as hidden in the entities list between the 3rd and 24th of the month, and no update badges will appear in the menu. Starting on the 25th, the status switches back to visible, and the regular notification reappears.

Troubleshooting

• Actions are flagged as unknown: Make sure the Spook integration is properly installed and loaded, as these actions are provided by Spook.
• Update remains visible right away: Did you forget step 1? If the entity was not hidden manually before the 25th, the automation will only take effect at the start of the next month.
• Automation didn’t trigger at 01:00: If your system was restarted at that exact time, the 2-day window (days 1 and 2) will catch it on the following day. You can test the action manually by selecting Run from the automation’s three-dot menu.

Sources: Forum: Simon42 – Forum