The future tense in Spanish is definitely one of the simplest of all tenses in Spanish to understand because there are only 12 consistantly used verbs considered to be irregular.

The Spanish future tense is one of those rare tenses in Spanish because it is very uniformed when conjugated. There are a small number verbs that are actually irregular Spanish verbs.

Even more surprising is that those verbs that are irregular, are not that hard to learn as they each have a distinctive formation making Spanish verb conjugation much easier…more about that in a short while to begin with however, I will initially cover how regular verbs are conjugated in the future tense.

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 a small number of irregular verbs that are used frequently. As with the regular verbs the endings are exactly the same, however what makes these verbs irregular is that there are irregularities in the stem of each of them. 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 future tense for irregular verbs are formed exactly as for regular verbs and that the irregular stems are used instead of the full infinitive.