Abstract. In this paper the problem of finding various spanning structures in random hypergraphs is studied. We notice that a general result of Riordan [Spanning subgraphs of random graphs, Combinatorics, Probability & Computing 9 (2000), no. 2, 125-148] can be adapted from random graphs to random r-uniform hypergaphs and provide sufficient conditions when a random r-uniform hypergraph H (r) (n, p) contains a given spanning structure a.a.s. We also discuss several spanning structures such as cube-hypergraphs, lattices, spheres and Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs.Moreover, we study universality, i.e. when does an r-uniform hypergraph contain any hypergraph on n vertices and with maximum vertex degree bounded by ∆? For H (r) (n, p) it is shown that this holds for p = ω (ln n/n) 1/∆ a.a.s. by combining approaches taken by Dellamonica, Kohayakawa, Rödl and Ruciński [An improved upper bound on the density of universal random graphs, Random Structures Algorithms 46 (2015), no. 2, 274-299] and of Ferber, Nenadov and Peter [Universality of random graphs and rainbow embedding, Random Structures Algorithms, to appear]. Furthermore it is shown that the random graph G(n, p) for appropriate p and explicit constructions due to Alon, Capalbo, Kohayakawa, Rödl, Ruciński and Szemerédi [7] and Alon and Capalbo [4,5] of universal graphs yield constructions of universal hypergraphs that are sparser than the random hypergraph H (r) (n, p) with p = ω (ln n/n) 1/∆ .