Desde, Desde Hace, Hace Que: How to Say How Long in Spanish

If you’ve ever written “Vivo aquí desde cinco años” and had a Spanish speaker wince, you’ve met one of the most common traps in the language: how to say how long something has been going on. English gets away with “for” and “since.” Spanish splits the job between three different tools — desde, desde hace, and hace… que — and mixing them up is one of the fastest ways to mark yourself as a beginner, even at an intermediate level.

The good news: once you see what each one is actually measuring, the confusion mostly disappears. Here’s the rule that makes it click.

The short answer

Desde points to a starting moment. Desde hace and hace… que measure a stretch of time. Hace on its own, with a finished action, means “ago.” That’s the whole system — the rest is just practice recognizing which situation you’re in.

Desde: marking the starting point

Use desde when you want to name the moment something began — a date, a day of the week, an event, a time of day. It answers “since when?”, not “how long?”

• Vivo en Madrid desde 2020. (I’ve lived in Madrid since 2020.)
• No la veo desde el lunes. (I haven’t seen her since Monday.)
• Trabaja aquí desde que se graduó. (She’s worked here since she graduated.)

Here’s the trap: desde cannot be followed directly by a plain number of years, months or days. “Vivo aquí desde cinco años” is the single most common desde mistake, and it’s incorrect — because “cinco años” isn’t a starting point, it’s a duration. That’s a job for the next structure.

Desde hace: measuring the duration

When you want to say how long something has been happening — not when it started, but the length of time itself — add hace after desde. This is the structure that fixes the mistake above.

• Vivo aquí desde hace cinco años. (I’ve lived here for five years.)
• Estudio español desde hace tres meses. (I’ve been studying Spanish for three months.)
• ¿Desde hace cuánto tiempo trabajas allí? (How long have you worked there?)

Notice the question word that goes with it: cuánto, not cuándo. You’re asking about quantity of time, not a moment in time.

Hace… que: the other way to say “for”

Spanish has a second, equally common way to express the same idea, just flipped around: hace + [amount of time] + que + [verb].