Genital human papillomavirus (HPV) is associated with the development of cutaneous malignant tumors, and differences in HPV subtypes are found in several cancers by histology. NF-κB is persistently activated in most cancers and confers a survival advantage to cancer cells, while A20 is a critical negative regulator of NF-κB and is an important tumor suppressor inactivated in B cell lymphomas. This study was undertaken to identify HPV types in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) as well as to determine whether the crosstalk of A20/NF-κB was involved in HPV-induced SCC. Overall, HPV positivity was observed to be 66.2 %, with HPV16 being most common followed by infection with HPV18. Out of 43 HPV-positive samples, 35 samples were positive for one or more high-risk HPV (HR-HPV) types, suggesting a high association of SCC with HR-HPV infection, while only five HPV infections were detected in 21 normal skin samples and low-risk HPV (LR-HPV) infection was the most common. Both A20 and NF-κB were overexpressed in HPV-positive SCC samples (56 vs 87.4 %) and were closely correlated with TNM stage and lymph node transfer, respectively. More interestingly, the expression of A20 and NF-κB was much higher in HR-HPV samples than in LR-HPV samples. These results suggest that the crosstalk of A20 and NF-κB may contribute to HR-HPV-associated tumor growth and metastasis of SCC and may be a novel therapeutic target for SCC in the future.