The political declaration at the first United Nations (UN) high-level meeting on tuberculosis (TB) held on 26 September 2018 included commitments by Member States to four new global targets.3 One of these targets is to diagnose and treat 40 million people with TB in the 5-year period 2018–2022. The approximate breakdown of the target is about 7 million in 2018 and about 8 million in subsequent years. The traditional method for diagnosing TB using a light microscope, developed more than 100 years ago, has in recent years been challenged by several new methods and tools. These methods are based on either the detection of mycobacterial antigens or on the detection of mycobacterial DNA. The novel tools to detect presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and resistance to anti-TB drugs call for evidence-based policy recommendations. The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a number of guidelines developed by WHO-convened Guideline Development Groups (GDGs), using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach to summarize the evidence and to formulate policy recommendations and accompanying remarks. However, the growing number of published guidelines complicates the overview of recommendations for the intended audience (which includes health care personnel, national TB programmes and policymakers), and WHO recognized the need to consolidate the recommendations into one document. The recommendations in this document have been presented in five guidelines published by WHO between 2016 and 2020, as shown in the box below. Earlier guidelines on diagnostics that were not developed according to the GRADE approach have not been included in this consolidated document