Spanish Compound Tenses: Every haber Tense on One Chart

Every Spanish compound tense is haber plus a past participle. Only haber changes; the participle stays frozen:

• He terminado. - I have finished.
• Había terminado. - I had finished.
• Habré terminado. - I will have finished.

Compound tenses at a glance

The whole family on one screen. Read down the second column: that is the only difference between the eight tenses.

Five of them carry everyday Spanish and have their own pages: the present perfect, the pluperfect, the perfect subjunctive, and the conditional perfect and pluperfect subjunctive. This page adds the other three: the future perfect, the past anterior, and a word on hubiere, which survives in legal texts: el que hubiere firmado (whoever shall have signed).

The forms of haber

Learn haber in each tense and you have every compound tense. Read down a column:

Usted takes the él form and ustedes the ellos form, as everywhere. The past subjunctive also has an -iese set (hubiese hablado), interchangeable with -iera and less common in speech.

Participles and three fixed rules

Regular participles: -ar verbs take -ado, -er and -ir verbs take -ido:

• hablar, hablado - spoken
• comer, comido - eaten
• vivir, vivido - lived

A stem ending in a vowel puts an accent on the í: leído, traído, oído, creído. Verbs in -uir do not: construido.

The irregular participles are few, and most are very common:

Verbs built on them inherit the irregularity: devolver, devuelto (given back); describir, descrito (described).

Three rules hold in all eight tenses (literary prose occasionally slips an adverb in, había ya salido, but in your own Spanish keep the two together):

Outside the compound tenses, used as an adjective, the participle does agree: Las puertas están abiertas. (The doors are open.)

The future perfect: will have done

The future of haber plus a participle places an action before a point in the future: English "will have done".

The stem is the irregular habr- of the simple future, and every form but habremos carries an accent. A deadline word usually comes with it: para (by), dentro de (within), cuando:

After cuando the future event itself goes into the subjunctive (llegues); the future perfect stays in the main clause.

Real future or a guess?

The same form also guesses about something that has probably just happened, as on the future of probability. English says "must have":

A future deadline (para el lunes) makes it a real future. A estas horas (by now), or a shrug about something you cannot see, makes it a guess. The guess sits between knowing and wondering:

The past anterior: hube hablado

The past anterior is haber in the preterite plus a participle. It marks an action finished just before another past action:

You meet it almost always after a time word meaning "as soon as" or "when": en cuanto, apenas, cuando, una vez que, tan pronto como:

• En cuanto hubo terminado, se marchó. - As soon as he/she had finished, he/she left.
• Apenas hubo salido el sol, se pusieron en camino. - Scarcely had the sun risen when they set off.
• Cuando hubieron cenado, salieron al jardín. - When they had had dinner, they went out into the garden.

Read it, do not write it

The past anterior belongs to literary prose and very formal writing. Everywhere else, the plain preterite does its job, and the time word already says "just before":

So recognise it in a novel as "had just done", and write the preterite yourself. Do not confuse hubo terminado with the everyday hubo meaning "there was": Hubo un accidente. (There was an accident.)

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Say three things you will have done by Friday with para el viernes habré.
2. Do the story and sort drills below.
3. Then the conditional perfect and pluperfect subjunctive: si hubiera sabido, habría venido.