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

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

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

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:

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.

• 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.

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:

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.

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…