Five species of noctuid moths, Helicoverpa armigera, H. punctigera, H. assulta, H. zea,and H. gelotopoeon, are major agricultural pests inhabiting various and often over ‐lapping global distributions. Visual identification of these species requires a great deal of expertise and misidentification can have repercussions for pest managementand agricultural biosecurity. Here, we report on the complete mitochondrial ge ‐nomes of H. assulta assulta and H. assulta afra, H. gelotopoeon, H. punctigera, H. zea, and H. armigera armigeraand H. armigera conferta’assembled from high‐throughputsequencing data. This study significantly increases the mitogenome resources for these five agricultural pests with sequences assembled from across different conti ‐nents, including an H. armigeraindividual collected from an invasive population in Brazil. We infer the phylogenetic relationships of these five Helicoverpa speciesbased on the 13 mitochondrial DNA protein‐coding genes (PCG's) and show that two publicly available mitogenomes of H. assulta (KP015198 and KR149448) have been misidentified or incorrectly assembled. We further consolidate existing PCR‐RFLP methods to cover all five Helicoverpa pest species, providing an updatedmethod that will contribute to species differentiation and to future monitoring ef ‐forts of Helicoverpa pest species across different continents. We discuss the value of Helicoverpa mitogenomes to assist with species identification in view of the con ‐text of the rapid spread of H. armigera in the New World. With this work, we providethe molecular resources necessary for future studies of the evolutionary history and ecology of these species.