Ir Conjugation: All Tenses, Explained Simply (with Examples)

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Ir is one of the first verbs every Spanish learner meets, one of the most useful, and one of the most irregular. It means “to go”, you'll use it constantly for travel plans, daily routines, and one of the handiest shortcuts in the whole language, and its conjugations look like they belong to three different verbs: voy, fui, iba, iré. Where did all those different shapes come from?

Don't worry. By the end of this guide you'll have every tense of ir laid out in clean tables, with example sentences for each, plus the one construction that instantly makes you sound more fluent. But first, the hack that saves you weeks of work.

The Ir Conjugation Hack: Learn These First

Here's the honest truth about conjugation tables: you do not need to memorise all seventeen tenses before you can use ir in real conversation. Native-sounding beginners lean on a tiny handful of forms.

If you learn nothing else today, learn the present tense of ir by heart:

• voy (“I go” / “I'm going”), vas (“you go”), va (“he/she/it goes”), vamos (“we go”), vais (“you all go”), van (“they go”)

That single row of six words will carry you through travel plans, daily routines, and directions. Now stack one bonus construction on top: ir + a + infinitive, which is Spanish's everyday way of talking about the near future. Voy a comer is “I'm going to eat”, vamos a viajar is “we're going to travel”. Learn that one pattern and you can talk about anything you're about to do, without touching the future tense at all.

Right, now let's build the full picture.

Ir at a Glance

Infinitive	ir
Gerund (-ing)	yendo
Past participle	ido
Verb type	irregular
English meaning	“to go”

A quick note on the pronouns I'll use in every table:

Spanish	English
yo	I
tú	you (informal singular)
él / ella / usted	he / she / you (formal singular)
nosotros / nosotras	we
vosotros / vosotras	you all (informal, Spain)
ellos / ellas / ustedes	they / you all (formal)

Ir Conjugation: Indicative Mood (Simple Tenses)

The indicative is the everyday, “stating facts” mood, and these five simple tenses are the backbone of ir. Here they all are in one place:

Pronoun	Present	Preterite	Imperfect	Future	Conditional
yo	voy	fui	iba	iré	iría
tú	vas	fuiste	ibas	irás	irías
él / ella / usted	va	fue	iba	irá	iría
nosotros/as	vamos	fuimos	íbamos	iremos	iríamos
vosotros/as	vais	fuisteis	ibais	iréis	iríais
ellos / ellas / ustedes	van	fueron	iban	irán	irían

And here's each one in action:

• Present – Voy al mercado todos los sábados. – “I go to the market every Saturday.”
• Preterite (a finished past event) – Fuimos a Irlanda el verano pasado. – “We went to Ireland last summer.”
• Imperfect (a past description or repeated habit) – De niño, iba a la escuela a pie. – “As a child, I used to walk to school.”
• Future – Algún día iré a Japón. – “One day I'll go to Japan.”
• Conditional – Iría contigo si tuviera tiempo. – “I'd go with you if I had time.”

Notice that imperfect row. It's a genuinely irregular imperfect, not the tidy -ía pattern you'd expect from an -ir verb, so iba, ibas, iba is one of the very few irregular imperfects in the whole language and worth memorising as its own little unit.

Ir Conjugation: Indicative Mood (Compound Tenses)

Good news here: the compound tenses are the easy part. Every one of them is simply the verb haber (conjugated) plus the past participle ido. Learn haber once and these fall into place for every verb in Spanish.

Pronoun	Present Perfect	Pluperfect	Future Perfect	Conditional Perfect
yo	he ido	había ido	habré ido	habría ido
tú	has ido	habías ido	habrás ido	habrías ido
él / ella / usted	ha ido	había ido	habrá ido	habría ido
nosotros/as	hemos ido	habíamos ido	habremos ido	habríamos ido
vosotros/as	habéis ido	habíais ido	habréis ido	habríais ido
ellos / ellas / ustedes	han ido	habían ido	habrán ido	habrían ido

• Present perfect – ¿Has ido alguna vez a Corea? – “Have you ever been to Korea?”
• Pluperfect – Cuando llegué, ya se había ido. – “When I arrived, she had already left.”
• Future perfect – Para junio, habremos ido a tres países nuevos. – “By June, we will have gone to three new countries.”
• Conditional perfect – Habría ido, pero estaba enfermo. – “I would have gone, but I was sick.”

(There's one more, the pretérito anterior, hube ido, but you can happily ignore it. It's so rare in modern Spanish that even native speakers go their whole lives without using it.)

Ir Conjugation: Subjunctive Mood

The subjunctive is the mood of doubt, wishes, emotion, and things that aren't (yet) facts. It feels intimidating at first, but with ir you really only need two forms day to day: the present subjunctive and the imperfect subjunctive.

Pronoun	Present Subjunctive	Imperfect Subjunctive (-ra)	Imperfect Subjunctive (-se)
yo	vaya	fuera	fuese
tú	vayas	fueras	fueses
él / ella / usted	vaya	fuera	fuese
nosotros/as	vayamos	fuéramos	fuésemos
vosotros/as	vayáis	fuerais	fueseis
ellos / ellas / ustedes	vayan	fueran	fuesen

The imperfect subjunctive has two forms, the -ra and the -se. They mean exactly the same thing and are interchangeable; the -ra form is more common in speech, especially in Latin America, so lead with that one.

• Present subjunctive – Espero que vayas a la fiesta. – “I hope (that) you go to the party.”
• Imperfect subjunctive – Si fuera rico, viajaría por el mundo. – “If I were rich, I'd travel the world.”

The subjunctive also has compound forms, built (again) from haber plus ido:

Pronoun	Present Perfect Subj.	Pluperfect Subj.
yo	haya ido	hubiera / hubiese ido
tú	hayas ido	hubieras / hubieses ido
él / ella / usted	haya ido	hubiera / hubiese ido
nosotros/as	hayamos ido	hubiéramos / hubiésemos ido
vosotros/as	hayáis ido	hubierais / hubieseis ido
ellos / ellas / ustedes	hayan ido	hubieran / hubiesen ido

There's also a future subjunctive (fuere, fueres…), but you can safely file it under “nice to recognise, never need to produce”. It survives only in legal documents, old proverbs, and fixed phrases like sea como fuere (“be that as it may”).

Ir Conjugation: Imperative Mood (Commands)

Telling someone to “go” uses the imperative, and ir has one of the strangest command forms in Spanish: the informal tú command is just ve, a completely different-looking word from the infinitive.

Pronoun	Affirmative	Negative
tú	ve	no vayas
usted	vaya	no vaya
nosotros/as	vamos	no vayamos
vosotros/as	id	no vayáis
ustedes	vayan	no vayan

Two quirks worth flagging. First, ve is identical in spelling to a form of ver (“to see”), so context has to do the work, the same story as ser and ir sharing fui. Second, look at that nosotros row: the affirmative “let's go” is vamos, not vayamos, even though every other affirmative command in this table matches its subjunctive. Vayamos exists and is technically correct, but Spanish speakers reach for vamos almost every time. Save vayamos for the negative, no vayamos, “let's not go”, where vamos can't be used at all.

• ¡Ve a comprar pan! – “Go and buy bread!”
• ¡Vamos! Se hace tarde. – “Let's go! It's getting late.”
• No vayas solo por la noche. – “Don't go alone at night.”

When to Use Ir (and Its Quirks)

Ir mostly does exactly what you'd expect, but a few patterns are worth locking in early:

• Ir + a + place is the basic “go to” – Vamos a Irlanda en agosto. – “We're going to Ireland in August.”
• Ir + a + infinitive is the near-future construction from the hack section above, and it's one of the most useful patterns in beginner Spanish because it sidesteps the future tense entirely. Va a llover. – “It's going to rain.”
• Vamos on its own is an everyday exclamation, “come on” or “let's go”, used constantly outside literal movement: ¡Vamos, tú puedes! – “Come on, you can do it!”
• Irse (the reflexive form) is a different animal. Plain ir is “to go” somewhere; irse is “to leave” or “to go away”, with the focus on departing rather than the destination: Me voy – “I'm off” / “I'm leaving”. Mixing these up is one of the most common beginner slips.

Why Is Ir So Irregular?

If ir‘s conjugations look like they were stitched together from three different verbs, that's because, much like its close cousin ser, they were. Ir is a suppletive verb: over the centuries it absorbed forms from more than one Latin root, and they never smoothed into one tidy pattern.

• The present-tense forms (voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van, and the whole vaya subjunctive family) trace back to Latin vadere, “to advance, to rush”.
• The infinitive, gerund, and imperfect (ir, yendo, iba) come from Latin ire, the verb Latin actually used for “to go”.
• The fu- forms (fui, fue, fueron, fuera, fuese) come from the Latin perfect of esse, “to be”, the exact same root that gives ser its preterite.

That last family is actually good news for you. If you've already worked through our guide to ser vs estar, you've memorised half of ir‘s conjugation without knowing it: the preterite of ir is identical to the preterite of ser. Fui means both “I was” and “I went”, and only context tells you which. Fui a Madrid is “I went to Madrid”; fui estudiante allí is “I was a student there”. One less tense to learn from scratch.

Common Mistakes with Ir

A few traps that catch nearly everyone:

• Treating the imperfect as regular. Ir doesn't take the standard -ía imperfect ending you'd expect. It's iba, ibas, iba, íbamos, ibais, iban, irregular from top to bottom, so it has to be memorised as its own unit. Our guide to preterite vs imperfect is worth a read if the two past tenses still feel blurry.
• Confusing ir with irse. Voy a la tienda (“I'm going to the shop”) and me voy (“I'm leaving”) are not interchangeable, one names a destination, the other names a departure.
• Using vayamos for “let's go”. It's grammatically fine but nobody says it. Vamos is the natural choice in the affirmative.
• Forgetting the a in ir a + infinitive. Voy comer isn't Spanish; you need voy a comer.

Ir Conjugation FAQ

Is ir regular or irregular? Irregular, and one of the most irregular verbs in the whole language. Its forms come from three separate Latin roots, which is why voy, fui, and iba look nothing alike.

What are the six present-tense forms of ir? Voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van, which is “I go, you go, he/she goes, we go, you all go, they go.”

How do you conjugate ir in the past? Spanish has two main past tenses. The preterite (for finished events) is fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuisteis, fueron. The imperfect (for descriptions and repeated habits) is iba, ibas, iba, íbamos, ibais, iban.

What does “voy a + infinitive” mean and how do you use it? It's Spanish's everyday near-future construction, equivalent to “I'm going to…” in English. Voy a estudiar is “I'm going to study.” Swap the pronoun and the ir conjugation to talk about anyone's plans: va a llover, vamos a comer, van a viajar.

Why is the preterite of ir the same as ser? Both verbs borrowed their preterite from the same Latin root, the perfect tense of esse, “to be”. Fui, fuiste, fue… are identical for both verbs, and context always makes the meaning clear.

¡Vamos! You've Got Ir Down

¡Vamos! means “let's go”, and after all that, you're ready to. You've got every tense of ir in front of you, an example for each, the near-future shortcut that makes you sound instantly more natural, and the backstory behind its lovely chaos.

The fastest way to lock these in is to use them. Build a few of these forms into flashcards (we love Anki for exactly this), then start dropping voy a… into real sentences about your own day, out loud. If you'd like to hear ir used naturally by native speakers, SpanishPod101 is a great listening resource.

But the tables were only ever the warm-up. The whole point of learning voy, vas and va is to walk up to a real person and tell them where you're headed, which is exactly what we get you doing from day one inside the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp. So go and say where you're going in Spanish. ¡Vamos!