Naturalness arguments for weak-scale supersymmetry favour supersymmetric partners of the third generation quarks with masses not too far from those of their Standard Model counterparts. Top or bottom squarks with masses less than or around one TeV can also give rise to direct pair production rates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that can be observed in the data sample recorded by the ATLAS detector. This document presents recent ATLAS results from searches for direct top and bottom squark pair production considering both R-parity conserving and R-parity violating scenarios, using the data collected during the LHC Run 2 at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV.