A significant proportion of eukaryote genomes consist of transposable element (TE)-derived sequence. These elements are known to have the capacity to modulate gene function and genome evolution. We have developed RetroSeq for detecting non-reference TE insertions from Illumina paired-end whole-genome sequencing data. We evaluate RetroSeq on a human trio from the 1000 Genomes Project, showing that it produces highly accurate TE calls.