Hacer in Spanish: Conjugation and Everyday Expressions

You're chatting with your host mom in Buenos Aires, and inside one minute you hear "¿Qué hiciste hoy?", "Hace mucho calor," and "no hagas eso" — three sentences, three different jobs, and the same five-letter verb holding all of them together. Hacer (to do / to make) is one of the first irregular verbs Spanish throws at you, and one of the most useful: skip past learning it properly and you'll stumble over weather talk, time expressions, and everyday commands for months.

Why Hacer Is Everywhere in Spanish

English speakers usually meet hacer as a simple translation of "to do" or "to make," then get thrown when it starts showing up in sentences that have nothing to do with doing or making anything at all. Spanish uses hacer to talk about the weather (hace calor, it's hot), to say how long ago something happened (hace dos años, two years ago), and to build everyday idioms (hacer falta, to be needed) — none of which map onto a literal "do" or "make" in English. Once hacer is conjugated and you know its special jobs, a huge slice of everyday Spanish stops sounding like a random exception and starts making sense.

Conjugating Hacer in the Present Tense

Key Phrases

• Hago (AH-goh) — I do / I make
• Haces (AH-sehs) — you (informal) do / make
• Hace (AH-seh) — he/she does/makes, you (formal) do/make
• Hacemos (ah-SEH-mohs) — we do/make
• Hacen (AH-sehn) — they do/make, you all do/make

[AUDIO: hago] [AUDIO: haces] [AUDIO: hacemos]

Hacer follows the regular -er pattern in every form except one: the yo form, hago, breaks the pattern with an extra g that doesn't show up anywhere else in the conjugation — the same kind of irregular yo form as tengo (tener) and salgo (salir). Everything else — haces, hace, hacemos, hacen — conjugates exactly like a regular -er verb, so once hago is locked in, the rest comes for free.

Hacer for Weather: Spanish's Impersonal Verb

Grammar Note

Spanish doesn't say the sky "is" hot or cold the way English does — it says the weather "makes" it that way, and only ever in the third-person singular, hace, no matter who's talking or when. There's no subject doing the making; the weather itself is just an idea hace expresses, which is why you'll never hear "hago calor" or "hacemos frío" — the form simply never changes.

Key Phrases

• Hace calor (AH-seh kah-LOR) — it's hot
• Hace frío (AH-seh FREE-oh) — it's cold
• Hace sol (AH-seh sohl) — it's sunny
• Hace viento (AH-seh vee-EHN-toh) — it's windy
• Hace buen/mal tiempo (BWEHN / mahl tee-EHM-poh) — it's good/bad weather

[AUDIO: hace calor] [AUDIO: hace frío] [AUDIO: hace buen tiempo]

Common mistake: forgetting these are noun phrases, not adjectives — intensify with mucho/mucha, not muy: "Hace mucho calor," never "Hace muy calor."

If you're chatting with someone in Buenos Aires or Santiago in December, don't expect hace frío — the Southern Hemisphere flips the calendar, so Argentina and Chile are deep in summer while Spain shivers through winter. Nochebuena asados (barbecues) often happen outdoors in short sleeves there, a detail that catches Northern Hemisphere learners off guard the first time someone mentions a beach trip for New Year's.

Hacer + Time: Saying "Ago" and "For How Long"

Grammar Note

Hacer has a second job that has nothing to do with weather: pairing with a length of time to say how long ago something happened, or how long something has been going on. Dropped at the front of a sentence, hace plus a time expression works like English "ago":

• Hace dos años. (Two years ago.)
• Hace una hora que llegó. (He arrived an hour ago.)
• ¿Hace cuánto tiempo vives aquí? (How long have you lived here?)
• Hace mucho tiempo que no la veo. (I haven't seen her in a long time.)

Common mistake: dropping que when a full clause follows — "Hace dos años llegué" sounds incomplete; Spanish wants "Hace dos años que llegué."

Hacer in the Preterite: What You Did

Key Phrases

• Hice (EE-seh) — I did / I made
• Hiciste (ee-SEES-teh) — you (informal) did / made
• Hizo (EE-soh) — he/she did/made, you (formal) did/made
• Hicimos (ee-SEE-mohs) — we did/made
• Hicieron (ee-see-EH-rohn) — they did/made, you all did/made

[AUDIO: hice] [AUDIO: hizo] [AUDIO: hicieron]

Grammar Note

The preterite — Spanish's go-to tense for a single, finished action in the past — is where hacer gets genuinely irregular: the stem changes to hic-, and the él/ella/usted form swaps that c for a z in spelling (hizo, not hico) to keep the sound consistent with Spanish spelling rules. It joins a small club of totally irregular preterite stems, alongside tener → tuv- and querer → quis-, so it's worth memorizing as its own set of five forms.

Common mistake: writing "hació" instead of "hizo" — the spelling change is easy to forget under pressure, but hizo is the only correct form.

Common Hacer Idioms Worth Knowing

• Hacer falta — to be needed — "Me hace falta tiempo." (I need more time.)
• Hacer caso — to heed — "¡Hazme caso!" (Listen to me!)
• Hacer la maleta — to pack — "Todavía no hice la maleta." (I still haven't packed.)
• Hacer un viaje — to take a trip — "Vamos a hacer un viaje a Perú." (We're taking a trip to Peru.)
• Hacerse + noun — to become — "Se hizo médico." (He became a doctor.)

Putting Hacer to Work

Picture catching up with your host mom in Buenos Aires after a day out. She might open with "¿Qué hiciste hoy?" (What did you do today?), and you'd answer with the preterite: "Hice un viaje al centro y hacía mucho calor" (I took a trip downtown and it was really hot) — folding a weather comment right into your answer, the way a native speaker naturally would. If she reminds you about tomorrow, she might add "Te hace falta un paraguas si llueve" (You'll need an umbrella if it rains), reaching for hacer falta instead of a literal "need." By the end of the conversation you've used hacer for what you did, what the weather was doing, and what you'll require — three jobs, one verb.

Practice Exercises

• Fill in the blank: "Yo ___ (I made) la cena anoche." (preterite of hacer)
• Translate to Spanish: "It's very cold today." (using hacer)
• Fill in the blank: "___ tres años que vivo en Lima." (hacer + time)
• Multiple choice: which is correct — "Ella hació la tarea" or "Ella hizo la tarea"?
• Translate to Spanish: "I need more money." (using hacer falta)
• Fill in the blank: "Nosotros ___ (we made) un viaje a Colombia el año pasado." (preterite of hacer)

Answer Key

• "Yo hice la cena anoche." — hice is the irregular first-person preterite of hacer.
• "Hace mucho frío hoy." — weather expressions use hacer in the third person, intensified with mucho, not muy.
• "Hace tres años que vivo en Lima." — hace + time expresses how long something has been going on.
• "Ella hizo la tarea" is correct — hizo, not hació, is the only correct third-person preterite form.
• "Me hace falta más dinero." — hacer falta expresses need, agreeing with the thing needed (dinero), not the person.
• "Nosotros hicimos un viaje a Colombia el año pasado." — hicimos is the first-person plural preterite of hacer.

Key Takeaways

• Hacer is regular in every present-tense form except the irregular yo form, hago; the preterite is fully irregular with the stem hic- (and hizo's c→z spelling change).
• Weather expressions always use the impersonal third-person hace, intensified with mucho/mucha, never muy.
• Hace + a length of time means "ago" or how long something has been happening, and idioms like hacer falta and hacer caso give hacer a life far beyond "to do" or "to make."

Ready to make hago, hiciste, and hace second nature? Try a round of Exercises to drill hacer's present and preterite forms until they're automatic, or browse Grammar for more of Spanish's essential irregular verbs.