As an age-group, young people are most at risk of poverty. Yet significant cross-national variation persists, which seems puzzling: the countries displaying the highest levels of youth poverty are (uncharacteristically) Nordic. How can such diversity be accounted for? Is the welfare state part of the story? First, I argue, unlike most studies, that in order to measure youth poverty it is better to use material deprivation and subjective poverty indicators, rather than income poverty. Second, I hypothesize that the welfare state has two potential routes to the alleviation of youth poverty. On the one hand, via ‘individualization’ of claims (allowing young people to claim benefits as full adult citizens), access to income support leads to lower levels of youth poverty. On the other, youth poverty levels can also be reduced through investment in young people’s human capital, in line with the ‘social investment’ strategy. These claims are confirmed by multilevel logistic regressions on three waves and across 23 European countries of the Eurofound’s European Quality of Life Survey. © The Author(s) 2023.