The piggyBac is a Class II transposable element originally discovered in the cabbage looper, Trichoplusia ni. The T. ni piggyBac element has been widely used in insect transgenesis. We here report the isolation of two distinct types of piggyBac-like elements in tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens (Fabricius), an important lepidopteran cotton pest in the United States. Degenerate PCR using the primers designed on the highly conserved regions of piggyBac-like sequences identified a 263 bp fragment with 43% identity to the transposase of T. ni piggyBac element. Subsequently, PCR using a single primer specific to the inverted terminal repeats (ITRs) isolated two distinct types of piggyBac-like elements, named as HvPLE1 and HvPLE2. The sequences for both HvPLEs are closely related to, but significantly different from the piggyBac-like element vabusame reported from Bombyx mori. A copy of the HvPLE1 was represented by an intact copy with 2285bp in size including perfect 16 bp ITRs flanking a single open reading frame (ORF) encoding a transposase of 581 amino acid residues. Multiple copies of deletion-derivatives of HvPLE1 were also detected with the deletions encompassing most of the transposase-coding region. Multiple copies of HvPLE2 isolated in this study are ~1400bp in length, and are apparently non-autonomous due to multiple stop codons and deletions, while they carry intact ITRs. Evolutionary implications of these two related, but distinct HvPLEs will be discussed.