How the Spanish Future Tense is Conjugated

The Spanish future tense is definitely one of the easier Spanish tenses to study as there are only twelve commonly used verbs that are to be irregular.

The Spanish future tense is a rarity as far as tenses are concerned in Spanish for the reason that it is very regular when conjugated. There are a small number verbs that are deemed to be irregular Spanish verbs.

What is an even bigger surprise is that these small number of irregular verbs, are not too difficult to learn as all of them have a easily recognized formation making Spanish verb conjugation much simpler…i’ll explain further shortly primarily however, I will first cover how regular verbs are conjugated in the tense known as the future.

The first big point is that each of the verb groups, the -er, -ir and -ar verb groups, have different endings in most of the other tenses in Spanish, in the future tense they all share exactly the same endings! And these endings are joined to the infinitive of the verb being conjugated. For example:

Hablar - ‘to speak‘

• hablaré        I will speak
• hablarás      you will speak
• hablará        he, she or it will speak
• hablaremos we will speak
• hablaréis     you will speak (plural)
• hablarán      they will speak

As mentioned, this type of conjugation is applied to every Spanish verb in the future tense but there are also a few irregular verbs that are often used. All of these irregular verbs use the same endings as used for regular verbs and their irregularities are stem changes. Thankfully, these irregular stem changes are used throughout the conjugation, so even the irregular verbs are pretty regular!

The irregular verbs in the future tense, accompanied by the irregular stem change are:

• caber ‘to fit’ or ‘to be possible’ -              caber becomes cabr
• decir ‘to say’ -                                         decir becomes dir
• haber ‘to have’ -                                     haber becomes habr
• hacer ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ -                      hacer becomes har
• poder ‘to be able to’ or ‘can’ -                 poder becomes podre
• poner ‘to put’ -                                        poner becomes pondr
• querer ‘to want’ -                                     querer becomes querr
• saber ‘to know’ -                                     saber becomes sabr
• salir ‘to leave’ -                                       salir becomes saldr
• tener ‘to have’ -                                      tener becomes tendr
• valer ‘to cost’ -                                        valer becomes valdr
• venir ‘to come’ -                                      venir becomes vendr

Always remember that the irregular future tense verbs listed above are conjugated exactly as for regular verbs and that the irregular stems are used instead of the full infinitive.