This qualitative study focuses on the agency of young people and their lived experience of poverty. Poverty is often only regarded as background information in social work and there is a need to make its effects more visible in the lives of social work clients through poverty-aware social work practice (PAP). This qualitative study uses deductive qualitative analysis (DQA) by employing Lister’s model of agency to show how young people are active agents in their lives, despite the harmful effects of poverty. Our analysis also employs Emirbayer and Mische’s understanding of agency to reveal how young people’s agency is restricted by poverty. The data consists of 84 written texts from young people aged 15–21 years old about their poverty experiences in Finland. The findings demonstrate how young people actively resist the effects of poverty through different daily and strategic actions, despite the structural constraints that poverty causes to their agency. The findings have multiple implications for social work practice and PAP. Social workers can support young people’s agency in several ways: through partnership, standing in solidarity with them, supporting critical discourses against poverty, advocating for youth-inclusive policies and working to remove structural barriers to agency in society.