A prominent argument within the youth representation literature states that to increase attractiveness of politics for young people, youth representation in parliaments should be increased. This argument however rests on the assumption that young legislators advance their own age groups’ interests substantively. To investigate this, we ask: Are the interests of young voters better represented by young legislators? Using the GLES 2021 candidate and citizen surveys from Germany, we investigate whether young voters and young candidates differ from their parties regarding attitudes on environmental, immigration and economic issues and whether young voters and young candidates of the same party are more congruent. While we find that attitudes of young voters and young candidates differ systematically from their parties, this does not translate into higher congruence between the two. Contrary to our expectations, preferences of young voters appear to be relatively well represented, also by older legislators. These findings provide new insight into the (under)representation of young voters as they show that the underrepresentation of young voters’ interests is driven by cross-party variation and does not persist within parties. This highlights the need for policy changes to increase substantial youth representation beyond nominating more young candidates.