Spanish Future and Conditional Tense: One Stem, 12 Verbs

By Daniel Herrera, Spanish teacher and curriculum designer

Updated August 26, 2026 · Reviewed by the Audaz editorial team

Why are the future and conditional the easiest Spanish tenses to form?

Every other Spanish tense makes you chop the infinitive first. You cut off -ar, -er or -ir, then add endings, and the endings differ by verb group. The future and the conditional skip the chopping. You keep the whole infinitive and add one set of endings. The same set works for all three verb groups.

Here is the full pattern with hablar (to speak). Read the two columns side by side and you will see the trick. The stem never changes.

Swap in comer (to eat) or vivir (to live) and nothing else moves. Comeré, comería. Viviré, viviría. Five of the six future endings carry a written accent. Every conditional ending carries one on the í. If you have read our guide to Spanish accent marks, you know why. The stress sits on the ending, and Spanish writes that down.

Which 12 verbs are irregular, and why do both tenses share them?

The irregular verbs do not change their endings. They change the stem, and only by squeezing it. A vowel drops out of the infinitive, and sometimes a d slides in to make the result easy to say. The Cervantes curriculum sorts the damage into three groups, and it lists the same three groups under the future and again under the conditional, word for word.

That is the whole list. Five, five and two. Their compounds mostly follow the parent. Mantener (to maintain) gives mantendré. Componer (to compose) gives compondré. The decir family is the messy one. Predecir (to predict) can go either way, and the regular predeciré is more common. Bendecir (to bless) and maldecir (to curse) are regular only: bendeciré.

One stem, learned once. Twelve exceptions, learned once. Every grammar book agrees these are the cheapest tenses in Spanish. Where the books go wrong is in what they say you should do with them.

Does anybody really teach the future and conditional first?

The internet version of this topic says these tenses are so easy that teachers should start with them. We checked the curriculum that most Spanish courses in the world are built from. The Instituto Cervantes publishes the Plan curricular, a level-by-level inventory of what a learner should handle at A1, A2, B1 and B2. The future and conditional are not early. They are placed with care, and the placement makes sense.

So the honest answer is no. Nobody teaches them first, and the reason is not that they are hard. It is that the everyday future in Spanish is ir a + infinitive, and that is what a beginner needs on day one. Voy a comer (I am going to eat) does the job of comeré in almost every conversation you will have at A1 and A2. The synthetic future arrives at B1 with a new job attached, and that job is guessing. We will get to it.

The conditional is split across two levels. At B1 you get the polite forms. At B2 you get the hard uses: reported speech and unreal conditions. That split is the single most useful thing in this article. Learn podría and debería now. Leave si pudiera, iría until the subjunctive stops scaring you. Our subjunctive guide is where that starts.

How often do native speakers use the -ré future?

Less than learners do. That is the finding nobody puts in a conjugation table. Aarnes Gudmestad and Kimberly Geeslin studied 151 English-speaking learners across five proficiency levels, plus 22 native speakers. Everyone read short story contexts and picked one of three verb forms for each future event: the -ré future, ir a + infinitive, or the plain present. The native speakers chose ir a 57.3% of the time. They chose the -ré future 28.9% of the time, and the present 13.8%.

Now look at what the learners did. Level 1, second-semester students, chose the -ré future in 12.2% of contexts. Level 2, fourth semester, chose it 40.7% of the time. Then the rate fell again with every level: 38.3%, 28.5%, 19.7%. The authors call the jump between Levels 1 and 2 an instructional effect. Learners get taught the future, and they start using it everywhere.

The shape of that chart is the argument of this article. The form is easy, so the textbook hands it over early in the second year. The learner then treats -ré as the word will and uses it for every future event. Native speakers do not. Their default is ir a. The gap only closes once the learner has heard enough real Spanish to notice that.

What is the -ré future really for in conversation?

Guessing. The Cervantes inventory calls it the futuro de probabilidad, and it sits at B1 next to the plain future. Serán las once does not mean “it will be eleven”. It means “it must be about eleven”. The speaker is estimating the present, and the future tense is the tool for the estimate. English does this with must, probably or I suppose. Spanish just changes the tense.

The first four examples come straight from the Cervantes inventory, listed under the Latin American section of the B1 future. The last one is the B2 entry, the futuro impreciso with ya. Notice how much attitude sits in that tense. Será bonita, pero is a shrug. Ya veremos is a door left ajar. That is the register the -ré future lives in when people speak, and it is why learners who use it for every plan sound a little formal.

There is a lovely symmetry here. Tendrá ocho años guesses about the present: he is probably eight. Tendría ocho años guesses about the past: he was probably eight. The Real Academia’s own glossary describes the second as parallel to the first, with the conditional standing in for the imperfect. Same stem, same guess, one step back in time.

What does the conditional actually do?

The Real Academia’s glossary defines the condicional simple as a relative tense of the indicative mood. It places an action at a point later than another point in the past, or inside a hypothetical frame. The first half of that definition is the one textbooks rush past, and it is the one you will meet most in books.

Take the glossary’s own example: Dijo que volvería a Nápoles (he said he would return to Naples). The return sits after the saying. It does not have to sit after now. The glossary shows all three cases. He said he would return before summer, and summer has passed. He said he would return today. He said he would return next month. Same verb form, three positions on the timeline. That is why some grammars call the conditional the pospretérito, the after-past. The RAE lists that name as a synonym.

There is a seventh, and readers meet it more than speakers do. In literary and journalistic Spanish, the conditional can replace the simple past. Meses más tarde se convertiría en su peor pesadilla (months later it would become his worst nightmare). The RAE calls this the narrative or factual conditional, and says it is rare outside those registers. If you read novels in Spanish, you will see it in the first chapter of almost any biography or family saga. It is not a hypothesis. It happened. The writer is just standing earlier on the timeline and pointing forward.

Why is “si tendría” the mistake to avoid?

English speakers build if I would have money in their heads and translate it. The result is si tendría dinero, and it is the one conditional mistake that marks you instantly. The rule is simple. The conditional goes in the result half of the sentence. The si half takes the imperfect subjunctive.

Si tuviera dinero, te haría un buen regalo. (If I had money, I would buy you a good present.) The RAE gives exactly this pair, and describes the si tendría version as widely discredited in educated speech, even though it turns up in the colloquial Spanish of some regions.

The same trap opens after para que, after verbs of asking and wishing, and after cuando pointing at the future. Me pidió que esperara, never esperaría. Ojalá lloviera, never llovería. If the clause is a wish, a purpose or a condition, the conditional is not welcome there. It waits in the main clause for the result.

Does Latin America use these tenses differently?

Yes, and the Cervantes inventory flags it in both entries. For the future, it records a preference across Spanish America for other structures: ir a + infinitive and the present tense. The example is blunt: vamos a decir where Spain might say diremos. In Central America and Colombia it adds haber de + infinitive and a lively ir y + present: Va y se cae for “he is going to fall”.

For the conditional, the inventory records low rates of the temporal use in Spanish America. Where a Spaniard says le dije que vendría (I told him I would come), a Mexican or Colombian is more likely to say le dije que iba a venir. The imperfect of ir plus the infinitive does the job of the conditional. If you learned Spanish from a Madrid textbook and then moved to Bogotá, that is one reason the future and conditional seemed to vanish from conversation. They did not vanish. They moved into the guessing register, and ir a took over the planning.

This fits what we found in our guides to Argentine Spanish and Colombian Spanish. The tenses are the same everywhere. The traffic through them is not.

How should a reader learn the future and conditional?

By reading, and by reading the right thing for each tense. The two tenses live in different places on the page. The conditional loves reported speech and narrative openings. The future loves dialogue, where people guess and shrug. So the fastest way to make both feel natural is to meet them where they actually live.

If you want a book to hunt in, our guide to reading Spanish books as a beginner picks titles where the dialogue is light and the reported speech is frequent. That is conditional country. And if you have never seen how all fourteen tenses fit together, the full tense guide gives you the map.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Instituto Cervantes. Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Niveles de referencia para el español. Gramática, inventario A1-A2 (sections 9.1.1 and 12.1) and inventario B1-B2 (sections 9.1.4 and 9.1.5). Centro Virtual Cervantes. Source of the level placements, the three irregularity groups, and the example sentences for the future of probability and the Latin American variants.
• Gudmestad, A. and Geeslin, K. (2013). Second-Language Development of Variable Future-Time Expression in Spanish. In A. M. Carvalho and S. Beaudrie (eds), Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 63 to 75. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Source of the selection rates by proficiency level and the instructional-effect reading.
• Real Academia Española and ASALE. Glosario de términos gramaticales, entry “condicional simple”. Source of the definition, the seven uses, the politeness alternation, the narrative conditional and the note on si tendría.
• Wikipedia, “Spanish irregular verbs”, section on irregular forms in the future, conditional and imperative. Cross-check for the twelve-verb list and the behaviour of the decir compounds.