Business Spanish in Latin America: The Formality Rules

By the Audaz Revista editorial team

Updated September 22, 2026 · Reviewed by the Audaz editorial team

Every guide to business Spanish gives you the same advice. Use usted. Start formal. Wait to be invited down to tú. We read 11 of the guides that currently rank for this, 21,136 words of them, and 8 of the 11 say some version of it.

It is good advice for talking to a person. We wanted to know something else. When a Latin American company writes to a customer, which pronoun does it pick? Nobody had counted. So we did.

What do Latin American companies actually call their customers?

We took a list of 86 well known companies in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru. Banks, airlines, supermarkets, phone companies, insurers, retailers. We read each home page and up to three of its contact and help pages.

Of those, 54 sites could be read as text. Three were only available as an archived copy older than 2026, so we dropped them. That left 51 sites, 112 pages and 176,787 words, spread evenly across the five countries.

Then we counted commands, because a command has to choose. Regístrate is tú. Registrate is vos. Regístrese is usted. The same button cannot be all three.

That is 272 commands using tú, 9 using vos and 9 using usted. The pronoun the guides tell you to default to is the one companies almost never use in public.

Which pronoun does each country use in its company writing?

The split by country is clean. One country does something different from the other four, and it is not the one the etiquette guides warn you about.

In all, 34 of the 51 sites used at least one command that could be pinned down. The rest were built so heavily in JavaScript that their buttons never appeared as text, which is a different problem and not ours today.

Why does Argentina write vos and never usted?

Because in Argentina vos is not slang. The Real Academia Española puts Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay in one group: “son áreas de voseo generalizado”. It adds that in those three countries the vos forms “son aceptadas sin reserva por todas las clases sociales”.

You can see it on the page. Movistar Argentina writes Suscribite y te escribimos por WhatsApp cuando tengamos una promo para vos. (Subscribe and we will message you on WhatsApp when we have an offer for you.) Personal writes Hacé todas tus gestiones más rápido y en un solo lugar. (Do all your admin faster and in one place.)

The verbs give it away even faster than the commands. We found 55 voseo present tense verbs in the Argentine copy, things like tenés, podés, querés and sos. Movistar Argentina alone had 21. Sancor Seguros asks ¿Cómo preferís que te contactemos? (How would you prefer us to contact you?) on its quote forms.

If you are writing for an Argentine audience, usted is not the safe choice. It is the odd one. Our guide to Argentine vos covers the conjugation, and it is easier than tú.

Does the same company change pronoun when it crosses a border?

Yes, and this is the clearest thing we found. Several of these brands run one company, one logo and one marketing team across several countries. The pronoun still changes at the border.

Movistar is the neat example. In Argentina it says Pasáte a un plan con factura. Tenés gigas de regalo. In Chile and Peru the same brand says Regístrate. Nothing about the company changed. The country did.

Our read: treat the pronoun as a local setting, like a currency or a plug socket. A Spanish speaker will understand you either way, but writing tú to a Buenos Aires audience sounds like a translation, and that is exactly the thing you are trying to avoid.

So where did usted actually survive?

Our raw count found 12 formal commands. We read all 12 in context, and three of them were not what they looked like.

So nine formal commands survive, and eight of them live on one page. Claro Colombia runs two sites. The shopper site says Cámbiate hoy a postpago. Haz todo el proceso en línea. The business site says Optimice su organización, Adquiera la tecnología que necesita para su empresa, and Comuníquese con sus clientes y proveedores.

Same company. Same country. Same week. The pronoun changed because the reader changed from a shopper to a business buyer. One card on that business page even mixes the two, pairing Aumenta la visibilidad de tu negocio with the button Solicítelo aquí.

The other place usted holds on is the writing no marketer controls. Chile’s WOM carries Infórmese sobre la garantía estatal de los depósitos, which is a regulated financial warning. Plaza Vea’s Haga clic sits in a cookie banner a lawyer wrote.

Why does Chile write tú when Chileans vosean in speech?

This one surprised us, then stopped surprising us. Chile has its own voseo. You hear it constantly. The RAE describes it as living “en el habla familiar y coloquial, sobre todo entre los jóvenes”, and then adds the line that explains our table: “en los registros formales se tutea”.

In formal registers, Chileans use tú. A company home page is a formal register. So Chilean brand copy writes tú, and our count found 59 tú commands and no Chilean vos at all.

Peru behaved exactly as the RAE says too. It calls Peru “un país tuteante”, a tú country, and all 77 of its commands in our sample were tú.

One more thing the RAE says is worth keeping. Where tú and vos live side by side, tú is often the middle setting, “tratamiento de formalidad intermedia”. It is not the friendly option there. It is the polite-but-not-stiff one.

Does this mean you can stop using usted at work?

No. Be careful with what we measured. This is published company copy, written by a brand, to a crowd, to sell something. It is not a record of how two people speak to each other in a meeting.

A brand writing tú to a million strangers is making a style choice. You writing to one person you have never met is making a social one. Those are different jobs.

The practical rule still holds for people. Start with usted with a new client, a stranger, someone senior or someone much older. Let them move you down to tú. It is easy to go from formal to friendly, and awkward to go back the other way. Our post on tú vs usted covers that choice in detail, including where the textbook rule breaks.

What the count does change is your expectations. If a Mexican bank’s website calls you tú, that is normal and it is not being rude. If your Argentine colleague writes tenés in an email, that is not sloppiness. And if you are writing marketing copy rather than a letter, the default has moved.

For the meeting itself, the softeners matter more than the pronoun. We covered those in our guide to Spanish job interview phrases, and the same hedging works in a client call.

What does a formal Spanish business email actually look like?

Here is the odd gap. Of the 11 guides we read, only 4 gave a greeting you could copy, and only 4 gave a sign-off. The punctuation almost none of them mention is the thing an English speaker gets wrong first.

The RAE is direct about it. In the heading of a letter or an email, you use a colon to separate the greeting from the body, and the body starts on a new line with a capital letter. On the comma that English speakers reach for, it says: “El uso de coma en este contexto es una costumbre anglosajona que debe evitarse en español”.

The last row is the rule most people miss. The RAE splits sign-offs by grammar. A phrase with no verb takes a comma before your name, so Atentamente, is right. A complete sentence takes a full stop, so it is Reciba un cordial saludo. and then your name.

Note that Estimado and Atentamente are the same in all five countries. The pronoun is the part that moves, not the envelope.

What should you do before your next Spanish email or meeting?

Our read: business Spanish has two settings, and most guides only describe one. Person to person, start formal and let them move you. Brand to audience, the formal setting is nearly gone everywhere we looked, and the only real question left is which informal pronoun the country uses.

Frequently asked questions

If you want the accent that goes with the pronoun, we have written about the Buenos Aires accent and about why Bogotá Spanish is called the clearest. For the wider split, see Latin American vs Spain Spanish. For the small talk that surrounds the formal part of any meeting, see our Spanish small talk phrases. And names come up in every introduction, so the two surname system is worth five minutes before you meet anyone.

In a hurry? We also made a nine slide web story version of this piece, with the country split and the email rule.

Sources

• Audaz corpus, 22 September 2026: 86 Latin American companies attempted, 51 sites measured, 112 pages, 176,787 words, across Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru. Counts, rulings and saved pages are held by our editorial team.
• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2005), entries voseo, usted and tú.
• Real Academia Española, Español al día, Puntuación de saludos y despedidas en cartas y correos electrónicos.
• Eleven published guides to business Spanish and to tú vs usted, read in full on 22 September 2026, 21,136 words, and scored for coverage.