What Time Is It in Portuguese: Full Guide

You glance at your wrist, realize you don't have a watch on, and turn to the person next to you on the metro in Rio. What comes out of your mouth? If you're new to Portuguese, probably nothing, because you never quite locked down what time is it in Portuguese beyond a shaky "que horas são" you half remember from an app. Here's the good news: the two core phrases you actually need are short, and once you understand the logic behind them, telling time stops being a memorization problem and becomes a pattern you can reuse forever. This guide covers the casual way to ask, the formal way, how to answer back with hours and minutes, quarter and half hours, morning versus afternoon versus night, the AM/PM question, the split between how Brazil and Portugal handle the clock, and the mistakes English speakers make on repeat. By the end, you'll be able to ask, answer, and actually understand the reply, whether it comes back as a clean "são três horas" or a rapid-fire string of minutes you weren't quite braced for.

The quick answer: how to ask "what time is it" in Portuguese

There isn't just one way to ask. Portuguese gives you a few options depending on how formal the moment is, and mixing them up isn't a huge deal, but knowing the difference will make you sound like you've actually spent time around native speakers rather than a textbook. According to Practice Portuguese's notes on telling time, the phrasing also shifts a little depending on whether you're in Brazil or Portugal, something we'll dig into more later.

Notice that "que horas são" uses the plural verb "são" even though English would never say "what hours are they." That's not a typo, and it's not random either. It's the first real grammar rule you need for this whole topic, and once it clicks, the rest of telling time in Portuguese gets a lot easier, a point Mosalingua's breakdown of asking the time also leans on before it even gets to vocabulary.

If you're only going to remember one phrase before a trip, make it "que horas são." It's understood everywhere, in every region, by every generation, and it never sounds too casual or too stiff for the moment. "Tem horas?" is worth knowing too, since you'll hear it constantly on the street in Brazil, but "que horas são" is the one that works as a safe default no matter who you're talking to or where you happen to be standing.

The "é" vs "são" rule: why the verb changes

Here's the part that trips up almost every English speaker in week one. In English, "it's" never changes no matter what time it is. It's one o'clock, it's two o'clock, it's midnight, the verb stays put. Portuguese doesn't work that way, because Portuguese doesn't treat "the time" as a stand-in idea the way English does. It treats each hour as an actual noun you're counting, and the verb has to agree with how many of that noun you're talking about.

So when the hour is exactly one, you use "é," the singular form of "ser" (to be), because you're really saying "it is one hour": "É uma hora." The moment the hour becomes two or more, the verb flips to "são," the plural form, because now you're saying "they are two hours," "they are three hours," and so on: "São duas horas," "São três horas," "São onze horas." FluentU's guide to time in Portuguese frames this the same way: you're not agreeing with a clock, you're agreeing with a number, exactly the way "hour" and "hours" work in English but pushed all the way into the verb itself.

This is a genuinely useful mental shortcut, not just Portuguese being difficult for the sake of it. If a number in the hour slot is one, use "é." If it's anything else, plural or otherwise, use "são." Mango Languages' walkthrough for Brazilian Portuguese points out that this same agreement carries through into every example you'll ever build, whether you're adding minutes, talking about noon, or describing a schedule. Once your brain treats "hour" as a countable noun instead of an abstract idea, the é/são switch stops feeling like a rule you memorized and starts feeling like common sense.

If you've dabbled in Spanish before, this pattern will already feel oddly familiar: Spanish does the exact same thing with "es la una" versus "son las dos," singular for one, plural for everything else. It's not a coincidence. Both languages inherited this agreement from Latin, where time was always expressed by counting actual hours rather than referring to some abstract "it." Portuguese just kept the habit going, and once you notice it, you'll start seeing it as one of the more logical corners of the language rather than an arbitrary exception to memorize.

Knowing the rule on paper and producing it instantly while a stranger is waiting for your answer are two very different skills, though. Most learners can explain é versus são perfectly in a grammar quiz and then freeze the moment someone actually asks them the time on a street corner. If you want that reaction to become automatic, it helps to practice saying these phrases out loud, not just reading them, which is the whole idea behind Comigo's free speaking quiz: it puts you in a spot where you have to produce the phrase with your mouth, at speed, the way real conversation actually demands it.

Adding minutes: how "e" links the hour and the minutes

Once you've got the hour locked in with é or são, adding minutes is almost embarrassingly simple. Portuguese just drops in the word "e," meaning "and," between the hour and the minutes, the same shape as English "ten past five" flipped around into "five and ten." Preply's guide to telling time in Portuguese lays this pattern out as the backbone of the whole minutes system, and it really is: learn this one connector and you can build almost any time between the hour and the half hour mark.

Notice that last row again: "é" instead of "são," because the hour is still one, even with minutes tacked on. The minutes don't change which verb you use. Only the hour number decides that. Migaku's rundown of Portuguese time expressions makes a point of stressing this, because learners sometimes assume that adding minutes somehow makes the phrase plural, and it doesn't. "É uma e quarenta" (1:40) is still correct, singular verb and all, right up until you cross the hour and start saying "são duas."

You can genuinely construct any minute value this way, from one minute past the hour up through twenty-nine, just by pairing "e" with the right number. That means the real prerequisite for telling time isn't grammar at all, it's just knowing your numbers cold, which is exactly why we've got a full numbers table waiting a little further down this page.

What about minutes past thirty? Technically you can keep going the same way all the way to fifty-nine, saying something like "são seis e quarenta e cinco" for 6:45, and plenty of people do exactly that in relaxed conversation. But once you're past the halfway point of the hour, most native speakers switch direction and start counting down toward the next hour instead, which is the pattern covered in the "para as" section below. Both are correct. Knowing both means you'll never get stuck waiting for someone to repeat themselves.

Half and quarter hours: "e meia" and "e quinze"

Portuguese has dedicated shortcuts for the half hour and the quarter hour, and they're worth learning as fixed chunks rather than building them from scratch every time. For the half hour, you say "e meia," literally "and half." São dez e meia means 10:30. É uma e meia means 1:30. Simple, consistent, no exceptions.

The quarter hour is where things get a little more interesting, because Portuguese actually gives you two options. You can say "e quinze," literally "and fifteen," treating the quarter hour exactly like any other minute value: São onze e quinze for 11:15. Or you can say "e um quarto," literally "and a quarter," which mirrors the English phrase "quarter past" almost exactly: São onze e um quarto, also 11:15. Babbel's magazine piece on time in Portuguese notes that both forms are correct and both get used, but they don't get used equally everywhere.

In Brazil, day to day speech leans heavily toward "e quinze." It's treated as just another number, the same way you'd say "e dez" or "e vinte," and that consistency makes it easier for learners to fold into the pattern they already know. Rio & Learn's guide to telling time, written from inside a Rio de Janeiro language school, backs this up: Brazilians default to "e quinze" far more often than "e um quarto" in casual conversation, even though both are technically correct and perfectly understood. In Portugal, "e um quarto" holds on more strongly in everyday speech, alongside "e quinze," so you'll hear both used almost interchangeably depending on the speaker.

Either way, if someone answers you with "e quinze" or "e um quarto," you now know they both mean the exact same fifteen minutes. Nobody will blink if you use one over the other, but if your goal is to sound natural in Brazil specifically, lean toward "e quinze" as your default.

Counting down to the next hour: "para as"

So far every example has counted forward from the hour: six and five, seven and ten, ten and thirty. But once you pass the half hour mark, native speakers usually switch direction and start counting down toward the next hour instead, the same way an English speaker says "twenty to six" instead of "five forty." Portuguese does this with the word "para," meaning "to" or "toward," combined with "as," the plural article that goes with "horas."

The structure is: minutes, then "para as," then the upcoming hour. Ten minutes before five becomes "dez para as cinco," literally "ten to the five," which lands as 4:50. Elon.io's grammar notes on Portuguese time expressions walk through this construction in detail, and it holds up consistently across both Brazil and Portugal.

When the upcoming hour is one o'clock, the article shifts to match the singular, so you'd say "para a uma" instead of "para as": "dez para a uma" means 12:50. It's the same é/são logic showing up again in a different corner of the grammar, agreeing with the number rather than following some arbitrary rule.

Here's a subtlety worth flagging early: not every Portuguese speaker counts down at all. Plenty of people, especially in fast, casual Brazilian speech, will just keep counting forward past the half hour instead, saying something like "são quatro e cinquenta" instead of "dez para as cinco." Both are completely correct and totally common. Speaking Brazilian's guide to telling time points out that the countdown form tends to show up more in careful or slightly more formal speech, while straight counting up through the sixty minutes is just as normal in relaxed conversation. Understanding both directions means you won't get thrown off no matter which one the person in front of you happens to use.

Specifying time of day: manhã, tarde, noite, and madrugada

Portuguese doesn't rely on AM and PM the way English does. Instead, once you're past noon or midnight and you want to be specific, you tack on a phrase describing the general chunk of the day the hour falls into. There are four of these, and they matter more than a simple morning/afternoon/evening split in English, because Portuguese carves out a fourth window for the deep overnight hours.

Treat those hour ranges as loose guardrails, not hard boundaries. Whether 6pm counts as "da tarde" or "da noite" genuinely depends on the season, the region, and even how dark it already is outside, since daylight length shifts the mental line people draw between afternoon and night. FluentU's coverage of these time-of-day markers makes the same observation: these categories track lived experience more than a clock, closer to how English speakers argue about when "evening" starts, and there's no official cutoff anyone consults.

"Da madrugada" deserves special attention because English simply doesn't have a clean equivalent. It covers the stretch after midnight and before sunrise, the hours when most people are asleep, clubs are closing, or a red-eye flight is boarding. "Chegamos em casa às três da madrugada" means "we got home at three in the morning," and it carries a slightly different flavor than "da manhã" would, more "the middle of the night" than "early start to the day." PortuguesePod101's breakdown of time expressions calls out madrugada as one of the vocabulary gaps that trips up English speakers precisely because there's no single English word that maps onto it cleanly.

A few more examples make the pattern stick. "Ela acorda às seis da manhã" means "she wakes up at six in the morning." "A reunião é à uma da tarde" means "the meeting is at one in the afternoon," and notice the singular "à uma" there, agreeing with the hour just like everywhere else in this system. "Eles chegaram às onze da noite" means "they arrived at eleven at night." Swap in any hour and any of the four time-of-day tags and you've got a complete, natural sentence every time.

Noon and midnight: the exceptions that break the pattern

Remember the é versus são rule: singular for one, plural for everything else? Noon and midnight ignore it completely, and it's worth knowing why so it doesn't feel like an arbitrary exception you just have to swallow.

"Meio-dia" means noon, literally "half-day," and "meia-noite" means midnight, literally "half-night." Grammatically, both are singular nouns, a single named point in time rather than a count of hours, so both always pair with "é," never "são": "É meio-dia" (it's noon), "É meia-noite" (it's midnight). You'll never hear "são meio-dia," because you're not counting twelve of anything at that moment, you're naming one specific fixed point, the same way English doesn't say "it's twelves o'clock" for noon.

Minutes still attach the normal way. "É meio-dia e trinta" means 12:30pm, "É meia-noite e quinze" means 12:15am. Portuguese Language Guide's vocabulary page on time lists these as fixed expressions worth memorizing outright rather than deriving from the general rule, and that's genuinely the easiest way to treat them: two irregular nouns, always singular, always paired with "é."

Being on time, early, or late

Stating the time is only half the picture. Once you can say what time it is, you'll want the vocabulary for whether that time is being hit, missed, or beaten, which comes up constantly in real conversation: apologizing for a late arrival, confirming a meeting is happening right on schedule, or just complaining about a delayed flight.

"Em ponto" is the one worth burning into memory first, since it attaches directly onto any hour you already know how to say: "às sete em ponto" means "at seven sharp," no minutes, no ambiguity. Migaku's rundown of Portuguese time expressions groups it with the punctuality vocabulary for exactly this reason, calling it out as one of the more practical, everyday additions once the core hour-and-minute system is solid. "Atrasado" and "adiantado" are also worth learning as a pair, since they're opposites that show up together constantly, whether you're talking about a person running behind or a clock that's simply set wrong. Babbel's magazine piece on Portuguese time notes that "adiantado" doubles as both "early" for a person and "fast" for a device, a small overlap that doesn't exist quite the same way in English.

Numbers you need for telling time

You can't build a single time expression in Portuguese without numbers, and the numbers that come up constantly in hours and minutes only run from one to thirty, since minutes never climb past fifty-nine but almost always get built by combining a base number under thirty with "e" (for anything past thirty, like 47, you'd usually flip to counting down instead: "treze para as [next hour]"). PortugueseWithEli's guide to telling the time recommends drilling this exact range before attempting full time sentences, and it's solid advice: shaky numbers make every other rule in this article useless.

Note the small spelling forks between Brazil and Portugal in the teens. Sixteen, seventeen, and nineteen swap a "z" for an "s" depending on the country, and fourteen has two accepted spellings, "catorze" and "quatorze," used more or less interchangeably in both. Pronunciation matters just as much as spelling here, since Portuguese numbers move fast in real speech, and hearing "que horas são" said at native speed on Forvo's pronunciation entry is a genuinely useful sanity check before you try producing it yourself.

Asking "at what time": "A que horas...?"

Here's a mix-up almost every English speaker makes at some point: confusing "que horas são?" with "a que horas?" They look similar, they both involve "horas," and they get used in completely different situations.

"Que horas são?" asks what the current time is, full stop. "A que horas...?" asks at what time something happens, and it needs an event attached to make sense: "A que horas o filme começa?" means "What time does the movie start?" "A que horas você chega?" means "What time do you arrive?" The little word "a" at the front does real work here; it means "at," and dropping it is the single most common error English speakers make with this phrase, because English "what time" doesn't visually distinguish between the two questions the way Portuguese does.

Lingopie's guide to asking the time frames the distinction simply: if you're asking about right now, drop the "a." If you're asking about a scheduled or future event, keep it. Try swapping the two in your head with an English filter and it clicks fast: "what time is it" versus "at what time [does this happen]." You'd never say "what time it is the movie starting" in English either, and that awkwardness is your signal that you need the "a."

Once you've got "a que horas" down, you can attach it to basically any question about a schedule: when a bus leaves, when a store opens, when a friend is free to meet up. It's one of the more genuinely useful phrases in this entire article, arguably more useful day to day than asking the current time, since you already usually know roughly what time it is, but you rarely know exactly when someone else's schedule lines up with yours.

24-hour clock vs 12-hour clock

This is where Brazil and Portugal start to diverge in a way that actually affects how you'll hear and read the time, not just which words get used.

In Portugal, the 24-hour clock shows up constantly in formal and written contexts: television schedules, train and bus timetables, official documents, digital displays in public spaces. The Wikipedia entry on time in Portugal notes that this 24-hour format is the norm for anything printed or displayed officially, even though casual spoken conversation between friends still defaults to the familiar 12-hour system with "da manhã," "da tarde," and "da noite" tacked on. So you might see "18:30" printed on a train departure board and still hear a Portuguese friend say "seis e meia da tarde" out loud to describe that exact same moment.

Brazil leans more consistently toward the 12-hour system in daily speech, full stop, with time-of-day markers doing the work that AM and PM do in English. But the 24-hour format still surfaces in business, aviation, medical, and other formal or safety-critical settings, the same places English speakers might encounter "1400 hours" in a military or logistics context. Blogs.transparent.com's piece on hours in Portuguese notes that Brazilian flight boarding passes and some official schedules print times in 24-hour format even though nobody would say "quatorze horas" out loud when asking a friend to grab lunch.

Reading a 24-hour time out loud in Portuguese follows the exact same rules you've already learned, just with bigger hour numbers. "14:30" becomes "catorze e trinta," literally "fourteen and thirty," no different in structure from "duas e trinta," just skipping the need to specify "da tarde" since the hour number already tells you it's afternoon. Mosalingua's guide points out that this is actually one of the easier parts of Portuguese time expressions once you've got the numbers solid, because there's no new grammar involved at all, just bigger digits.

Writing the time: the "h" shorthand

Spoken Portuguese and written Portuguese don't always match, and time is one of the clearest examples. Say a time out loud and you'll build it the way this whole article has laid out, with "e," "para as," and time-of-day markers. Write it down on an invitation, a text message, a store sign, or a schedule, and Portuguese speakers in both Brazil and Portugal commonly reach for a completely different shorthand: the letter "h" standing in for "horas," used the way English uses a colon.

You'll spot this format on store hours, party invitations, TV guides, and appointment confirmations constantly, and it usually pairs with the 24-hour numbering discussed earlier, especially in Portugal. Blogs.transparent.com's piece on hours in Portuguese points out that the "h" shorthand is essentially the written twin of the spoken 24-hour habit: even a casual WhatsApp message confirming plans might read "nos vemos às 19h" (see you at 7pm) even though the person would say "sete da noite" if you asked them out loud. A colon-based format, like "19:00," also shows up, especially on digital displays and in more international or tech-facing contexts, so don't be surprised to see both conventions side by side on the same page. Either way, once you can read a written time, converting it into a spoken sentence is just a matter of applying everything else in this guide.

Brazil vs Portugal: a quick comparison

You've already seen a few of these differences scattered through this article, but it helps to see them side by side. None of these differences will make you unintelligible if you get them backwards, but they will make you sound noticeably more natural in whichever country you're actually talking to people from.

Migaku's comparison of Portuguese time vocabulary and Mango Languages' Brazilian-focused walkthrough both point at the same underlying pattern here: the core structure, é versus são, adding minutes with "e," counting down with "para as," is identical across both varieties. What shifts is vocabulary preference and formality, not the grammar underneath it. Learn the system once and it travels with you across the whole Portuguese-speaking world; you're just adjusting your accent and a handful of word choices depending on where you land.

Pronunciation shifts too, and it's worth being ready for it. European Portuguese tends to clip unstressed vowels more sharply than Brazilian Portuguese does, so "são" and "horas" can come out sounding noticeably more compressed from a speaker in Lisbon than from someone in São Paulo. Neither version is more correct, they're just different accents applied to the exact same words, the same way "water" sounds different in Boston and London without either side being wrong.

Common mistakes English speakers make

Some of these you've already seen flagged above, but they're worth collecting in one place, because they're the errors that show up again and again, no matter how much vocabulary someone has memorized.

Two of these deserve a closer look, because they don't come from carelessness so much as from your English (or Spanish) instincts filling in a gap before your Portuguese brain has a chance to catch it.

The "que horas são" versus "a que horas" mix-up happens because English collapses both questions into the same three words, "what time," and leaves context to do the sorting. Your mouth reaches for the phrase it already knows fluently, usually "que horas são," even in a sentence that's actually asking about a future event. Preply's guide to Portuguese time expressions flags this as one of the top errors beginners make in their first few weeks, precisely because it's invisible in English and only becomes a problem once you're forming full Portuguese sentences.

The "half past" instinct is a translation reflex more than a grammar error. English speakers who haven't fully absorbed "e meia" sometimes try to build something literal, reaching for word-by-word equivalents of "half" and "past" instead of just using the fixed chunk Portuguese actually has for it. Mosalingua's guide recommends treating "e meia" the same way you'd treat an idiom in your own language: memorize it as one unit, not as three words stitched together, and the literal-translation urge fades fast. The meio-dia and meia-noite slip comes from the opposite direction, over-applying the é/são rule instead of under-applying it. Once "são duas horas" and "são três horas" feel automatic, it's tempting to assume every time expression pluralizes the same way, but Portuguese Language Guide's vocabulary notes are worth a second look here, since these two nouns simply sit outside the pattern entirely.

That "menos" mistake deserves a quick note if you've studied any Spanish before Portuguese. Spanish tells time by subtracting minutes from the upcoming hour using "menos," as in "las cinco menos diez" for 4:50. Portuguese does something structurally similar in meaning, counting down toward the next hour, but the actual word is completely different: "para as," never "menos." Preply's guide flags this exact cross-language interference as one of the most persistent habits Spanish-background learners carry into Portuguese, and it's an easy one to fix once you know it's there.

The é/são mistake tends to be the stickiest of the bunch, mostly because it requires you to think one beat ahead before you speak, checking the hour number before your mouth commits to a verb. Reading about the rule fixes your understanding. It doesn't fix your reflexes. The gap between knowing a rule and producing it instantly, under the mild pressure of a real conversation, is exactly the gap that trips people up on the street, on a call, in a classroom. That gap only closes with actual spoken repetition, which is the reasoning behind building Comigo around talking out loud from day one instead of tapping through multiple choice screens: your mouth needs the reps just as much as your brain needs the rule.

Practice dialogues

Rules are easier to hold onto once you've seen them inside an actual exchange. Here are three short, natural conversations using the phrases from this article.

Dialogue 1: Asking a stranger for the time

Ana: Com licença, tem horas? (Excuse me, do you have the time?)

Carlos: Tenho sim. São quatro e vinte. (Yes, I do. It's four twenty.)

Ana: Obrigada! Você sabe a que horas a loja fecha? (Thank you! Do you know what time the store closes?)

Carlos: Acho que fecha às sete da noite. (I think it closes at seven at night.)

Dialogue 2: Planning around a movie

Beatriz: A que horas o filme começa? (What time does the movie start?)

Diego: Começa às oito e quinze. Chegamos um pouco antes? (It starts at eight fifteen. Should we get there a little before?)

Beatriz: Boa ideia. São sete e meia agora, então temos tempo. (Good idea. It's seven thirty now, so we have time.)

Diego: Perfeito. Nos vemos daqui a pouco. (Perfect. See you in a bit.)

Dialogue 3: Scheduling a meeting at the office

Sofia: A que horas é a reunião amanhã? (What time is the meeting tomorrow?)

Pedro: É às dez em ponto. Não pode chegar atrasada. (It's at ten sharp. You can't arrive late.)

Sofia: Tranquilo, sempre chego adiantada. São nove agora, tenho tempo de sobra. (Relax, I always arrive early. It's nine now, I've got plenty of time.)

Pedro: Ótimo. Nos vemos na sala de reuniões às dez em ponto, então. (Great. See you in the meeting room at ten sharp, then.)

Read all three of these out loud a couple of times, not just with your eyes. The rhythm of "a que horas" versus "que horas são" only really sinks in once your mouth has produced both a few times back to back, which is a small piece of exactly what a guided speaking session on Comigo's quiz is built to give you, minus the awkwardness of practicing on an actual stranger.

Frequently asked questions

How do you say "what time is it" in Brazilian Portuguese?

The most common version is "Que horas são?" For a more casual, street-level version, especially when asking a stranger quickly, Brazilians often say "Tem horas?" Speaking Brazilian's guide confirms both are correct and widely understood; "que horas são" is simply the safer default in any situation.

Is it "que horas são" or "que horas é"?

"Que horas são" is by far the standard, everyday phrasing, and it's the one every guide, from FluentU to Practice Portuguese, leads with. "Que hora é," singular, does exist and gets used regionally and casually, but it's far less common and can sound slightly off in more careful speech. Stick with "que horas são" unless you've specifically heard locals around you using the singular version.

How do you say AM and PM in Portuguese?

Portuguese doesn't really use direct equivalents of AM and PM in everyday speech. Instead, it attaches "da manhã," "da tarde," "da noite," or "da madrugada" to the hour to specify which part of the day you mean, and in more formal or written contexts, especially in Portugal, it just switches to the 24-hour clock entirely, sidestepping the AM/PM question altogether. Elon.io's grammar notes cover this in more detail if you want the full breakdown of how each time-of-day marker gets used.

How do you ask what time something starts or happens?

Use "A que horas," not "que horas são." "A que horas começa?" means "What time does it start?" This is one of the most commonly confused pairs for English speakers, since English uses "what time" for both questions and doesn't flag the difference the way Portuguese does with that small leading "a."

Do Brazilians and Europeans tell time the same way?

The underlying grammar, é versus são, adding minutes with "e," counting down with "para as," is identical in Brazil and Portugal. What changes is vocabulary preference (Brazilians favor "e quinze," Portugal holds onto "e um quarto" more) and format habits (Portugal uses the 24-hour clock far more in writing and schedules). The Wikipedia page on time in Portugal and Mango Languages' Brazil-specific guide both illustrate this same split from opposite sides of it.

Do Portuguese speakers write time with a colon or with "h"?

Both show up, but the "h" shorthand, standing in for "horas," is especially common in Brazil and Portugal alike: "15h" for 3pm, "9h30" for 9:30am, "0h" for midnight. Elon.io's grammar notes on Portuguese time expressions cover this written convention alongside the spoken rules, and it's genuinely worth recognizing even if you never use it yourself, since you'll run into it on schedules, invitations, and store signage constantly.

What does "em ponto" mean?

"Em ponto" means "on the dot" or "sharp." It attaches directly to any hour, so "às nove em ponto" means "at nine sharp," no minutes attached, no wiggle room implied. Migaku's guide to Portuguese time expressions lists it as one of the most useful add-ons once you've got the basic hour and minute system down, since it comes up constantly around appointments, meetings, and transport.

How do you say you're running late in Portuguese?

"Estou atrasado" (for a man) or "estou atrasada" (for a woman) both mean "I'm late." If you want to warn someone ahead of time that you'll be a few minutes behind, you can say "vou chegar atrasado" or "vou chegar atrasada," meaning "I'm going to arrive late." Rio & Learn's guide to telling time notes this is one of the most commonly used time-related phrases in daily Brazilian conversation, right alongside asking the time itself.

Telling time in Portuguese really does come down to a small, learnable set of pieces: know your numbers, know when to use "é" versus "são," know that "e" adds minutes forward and "para as" counts them down, and know your four windows of the day. Stack those together and you can build almost any time expression you'll ever need, in Brazil or in Portugal. The words on this page will get you there on paper. Actually saying them, fast, in a real conversation, without freezing on the é/são switch, is a different kind of practice, the kind that happens out loud. And once you can ask a stranger the time and understand their answer without a beat of hesitation, you'll know the grammar actually stuck. If you'd like a low-pressure way to hear yourself get there, from greetings covered in how to say hello in Portuguese all the way through small talk like how are you in Portuguese and even wrapping up a chat with goodbye in Portuguese, that's exactly the gap Comigo was built to close.