LBCC E-ESL Online Learning

    Future Perfect Tense

The future perfect tense is used when one wants to talk about an event that will happen in the future before some other time in the future.
For example:

Harold won't be in the Multimedia Classroom at 11 p.m. tonight!  He will have gone home by then.

The first sentence, written in blue, is in the simple future tense.  The second sentence, written in red, uses the future perfect tense.

This exercise will show you how to form and use the future perfect tense.  It also contains interactive quizzes so that you can check your understanding of this tense.

Forming and Using the Future Perfect Tense

Forming the Future Perfect Tense

The future perfect tense has four parts.  To demonstrate these parts, the following sentence will be used.

1. Like all sentences, a sentence in the future perfect tense needs a subject.  In this case, "the boys" is the subject.

 
2. The modal, "will have", or its negative, "will not have/won't have" follows.

*** REMEMBER***, will have and will not have/won't have are already conjugated. They do not ever need to be changed to match the subject.
 
3. A past participle is needed next.  In our case, the past particle is "left."  Left is the past participle of "to leave."

 
4. A prepositional time phrase completes the future perfect tense.  In this case, "by then" is the prepositional time phrase.  Other phrases such as by tomorrow or by next month could also be used as long as they are in the future.  The phrase, by yesterday, could not be used with the future perfect tense.

The future perfect tense is used when one wants to talk about an event that will happen in the future before some other time in the future.  The future perfect tense is used after a future progressive/continuous or simple future sentence.  The future perfect tense is best understood by looking at a couple of examples.

• Roger won't be driving his old car next summer.  He will have bought a new car by then.

 

 

These two sentences tell us that Roger currently has an old car.  However, sometime in the future before next summer, Roger will buy a new car.  We don't know exactly when but we know it will be before next summer.
 

• Laurie won't have to take out the garbage when she gets home.  Harold will have done it by then.

 

 

These two sentences tell us that the garbage needs to be taken out.  Laurie won't have to do it though because Harold will do it before she gets home from work.  We don't know exactly when Harold will take the garbage out but we know that it will be before Laurie gets home.

• Future perfect multiple choice quiz
• Future perfect fill-in-the-blank quiz

• Quia Future Continuous and Future Perfect Quiz