Grouping Lights in Home Assistant

I had three RGB bulbs in my office and one YAML group that stopped existing after a Home Assistant update. No warning in the dashboard. No useful error in the logs. The entity was simply gone.

The replacement lives under Helpers. One group now gives me a single toggle, brightness slider, and color picker for all three bulbs.

The YAML group disappeared

The original way to create a light group was a platform: group entry in configuration.yaml:

light:
  - platform: group
    name: Office Colors
    entities:
      - light.office_color_1
      - light.office_color_2
      - light.office_color_3

This approach was part of HA’s early design where nearly everything lived in YAML — integrations, automations, entities, groups. The problem is that YAML-defined entities can’t be managed through the UI. You can’t rename them, move them between areas, or disable them without editing a file and restarting. As Home Assistant shifted toward a storage-backed configuration model, YAML entity definitions became inconsistent with how the rest of the system works.

The light platform group was deprecated and removed in Home Assistant 2026.5. If you restart HA with this YAML still in your config, the group entity simply doesn’t appear. No error in the logs. It silently does nothing, which is how most people discover it’s gone — they spend time debugging an entity that no longer exists.

Helpers replaced it

Helpers are entities created and stored in HA’s internal config registry, not in files. They persist across restarts, can be edited from the UI, and behave identically to any other entity. Renaming a Helper group renames the entity. Assigning it to an area works. Disabling it from the UI works.

The YAML approach couldn’t do any of that without a file edit and a restart.

Helpers also handle live reloads. Create a group, and it appears immediately. Delete it, and it disappears immediately. No restart cycle.

Creating the group

Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Helpers → Create Helper → Group → Light Group.

Name the group, select the member entities, and save. Home Assistant creates the group entity immediately.

Then assign it to an area and hide the individual member entities so they don’t show up as separate controls everywhere:

1. Go to Settings → Entities
2. Search for each member light
3. Open the entity → gear icon → set Visibility to Hidden

The group stays visible. The members are still controllable through automations and scripts — hiding only removes them from dashboards and Lovelace cards.

Color control

For RGB or RGBW bulbs, the group exposes the full color picker if all members support it. Setting a color on the group sends the same hue, saturation, and brightness to every member simultaneously.

Color temperature works the same way — one slider controls all members.

Where it breaks down: mixing bulb types. If your group has two RGB bulbs and one color-temperature-only bulb, the group exposes only the capabilities every member shares. In that case, you lose the color picker and get only brightness and color temperature control. The group capability is the intersection, not the union.

Keep bulb types consistent within a group if you want full color control.

What HomeKit sees

If you’re exposing Home Assistant to Apple HomeKit via a bridge, the group entity appears as a single accessory with color control. The individual member lights appear as separate accessories unless you hide them in the entity registry.

Hiding members in HA (not just from HomeKit) is the cleaner approach — a hidden entity is automatically excluded from HomeKit, so you don’t need to manage the bridge filter separately.