The viitorul anterior (future perfect) names an action that will be completed before some later point in the future — English "will have done." Până mâine voi fi terminat raportul ("By tomorrow I will have finished the report") locates a finished action at a future vantage point. It is a precise, elegant tense — and in spoken Romanian, an increasingly rare one. This page shows you how it is built, when formal Romanian still uses it, and what colloquial speakers say instead.
How it is built
The formula stacks two pieces onto the literary future:
voi / vei / va / vom / veți / vor + fi + [participiu]
You take the future auxiliary (the same voi, vei, va... set used for the literary voi merge future), add the invariable fi, and finish with the past participle of the main verb. The participle does not agree in gender or number here — it stays in its fixed masculine-singular form, exactly as in the perfect compus.
| Person | Viitorul anterior of a termina | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| eu | voi fi terminat | I will have finished |
| tu | vei fi terminat | you will have finished |
| el / ea | va fi terminat | he / she will have finished |
| noi | vom fi terminat | we will have finished |
| voi | veți fi terminat | you (pl.) will have finished |
| ei / ele | vor fi terminat | they will have finished |
Only the first auxiliary inflects; fi and the participle are constant.
Până vineri voi fi citit toată cartea.
By Friday I will have read the whole book.
Când vei ajunge tu, noi vom fi plecat deja.
By the time you arrive, we will already have left.
When it is used
The viitorul anterior expresses anteriority within the future: action A finishes before moment or action B, both of which lie ahead of now. It is at home in formal writing, careful prose, and temporal clauses introduced by după ce (after), până (când) (by the time / until), and de îndată ce (as soon as).
După ce voi fi citit dosarul, vă voi comunica decizia.
After I have read the file, I will inform you of the decision.
De îndată ce va fi semnat contractul, lucrările pot începe.
As soon as he has signed the contract, the works can begin.
Generația aceasta va fi trăit cele mai mari schimbări tehnologice din istorie.
This generation will have lived through the greatest technological changes in history.
That last example, with no explicit time clause, has a slightly speculative ring — "will (presumably) have lived through" — which leads directly to the tense's most interesting quirk.
It is largely formal and literary
Here is the honest truth: in everyday Romanian, almost nobody says voi fi terminat. The whole voi-future is already formal, and stacking fi + participle on top of it pushes the construction firmly into written and elevated registers — official correspondence, journalism, literature, legal and administrative prose.
In conversation, speakers reach for one of two colloquial replacements:
- o să fi + participle — the o-să future carrying the fi
- participle of completion: o să fi terminat.
- The simple colloquial future plus an adverb — letting deja, până atunci, or până mâine signal the "already done by then" meaning: o să termin până mâine.
Până atunci o să fi terminat tot, nu-ți face griji.
By then I'll have finished everything, don't worry.
Până vii tu, eu o să termin de gătit.
By the time you come, I'll be done cooking.
The overlap with the presumptive
Now the connection worth carrying away. Romanian has a separate mood, the prezumtiv (presumptive), which expresses supposition about a completed action: o fi terminat — "he's probably finished / he must have finished." Look at the building blocks:
- Future perfect (formal): va fi terminat — "will have finished"
- Presumptive (colloquial): o fi terminat — "(he) has probably finished"
Both are fi + participle constructions; they differ only in the auxiliary at the front (va vs the frozen o). Because the colloquial future perfect (o să fi terminat) and the presumptive (o fi terminat) sit so close in both form and meaning, casual Romanian lets them blur. A sentence like o fi ajuns deja can read as "he must have arrived by now" (presumptive) or shade into "he'll have arrived by then" depending on context. This shared fi + participle spine is why the two feel like relatives — recognising the overlap helps you parse fast colloquial speech.
La ora asta o fi ajuns deja acasă.
At this hour he's probably already gotten home.
Comparison with English
English uses its future perfect comfortably in speech — "I'll have finished by Friday" is perfectly ordinary. Romanian does not mirror this: its morphological future perfect is markedly more formal than the English one. So the natural-sounding English future perfect should usually be rendered with the colloquial o să options, not a word-for-word voi fi. English speakers tend to over-produce voi fi terminat precisely because it maps so neatly onto "will have finished" — but the register is wrong for conversation.
Common Mistakes
❌ Voi fi terminată raportul până mâine.
Incorrect — the participle does not agree for gender; it stays 'terminat'.
✅ Voi fi terminat raportul până mâine.
I will have finished the report by tomorrow.
❌ Până vii tu, eu termin.
Incorrect for formal writing — the simple present misses the completed-before-a-future-point meaning.
✅ Până vei veni tu, eu voi fi terminat.
By the time you come, I will have finished.
❌ Salut! Până diseară voi fi rezolvat totul.
Register mismatch — too literary for a casual message to a friend.
✅ Salut! Până diseară o să fi rezolvat tot.
Hi! I'll have sorted everything out by tonight.
❌ Vom avea terminat până luni.
Incorrect — Romanian does not use 'a avea' + participle for the future perfect; the auxiliary is 'fi'.
✅ Vom fi terminat până luni.
We will have finished by Monday.
Key Takeaways
- voi fi + participle builds the future perfect: completion before a later future point.
- The participle is invariable; only the front auxiliary (voi, vei, va...) inflects.
- It is largely formal/literary. In speech, use o să fi terminat or simple future + an adverb like până atunci.
- It shares its fi + participle shape with the presumptive (o fi terminat), and the two blur in casual Romanian.
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Start learning Romanian→Related Topics
- The Literary Future (voi + infinitive)B1 — How to form Romanian's formal future — the auxiliary voi/vei/va/vom/veți/vor plus the bare short infinitive — where it belongs (news, literature, officialdom), and how clitics attach to it.
- The Colloquial Future (o să + conjunctiv)A2 — How to form and use the everyday spoken future with invariable 'o' plus 'să' and the conjunctive — the default future of conversational Romanian.
- The Romanian Futures: OverviewA2 — A map of Romanian's four ways to talk about the future — voi merge, o să merg, am să merg, and the bare present — and, crucially, which register each one belongs to.
- The Perfect Compus: OverviewA1 — An introduction to the perfect compus (am + past participle), Romanian's everyday past tense for completed actions — the only past tense the spoken language uses in practice.
- Future-in-the-PastB2 — How Romanian says 'was going to / would later' — reported and narrated future seen from a past vantage point, with urma să as the cleanest idiomatic device.