Bacteriology and histopathology are the most commonly used tests for official confirmatory diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle. In most countries, PCR is also increasingly being used because it allows a fast diagnosis. This test can be applied as a supplement to or a replacement for current bTB confirmatory diagnostic tests but its characteristics have first to be evaluated. This study was designed to estimate and compare sensitivities and specificities of bacteriology, histopathology and PCR under French field conditions, in the absence of a gold standard using latent class analysis. The studied population amounted to 5,211 animals from whom the samples were subjected to bacteriology and PCR (LSI VetMAX™ Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex PCR Kit, Life Technologies). Samples from 697 of these animals were also subjected to histopathology. Bayesian models were developed, allowing for dependence between bacteriology and PCR, while assuming independence from histopathology. The sensitivity of PCR was higher than that of bacteriology (on average 87.7[%] [[]82.5-92.3[%]] versus 78.1[%] [[]72.9-82.8[%]]) while specificity of both tests was found to be very high (on average 97.0[%] for PCR [[]94.3-99.0[%]] and 99.1[%] for bacteriology [[]97.1-100.0[%]]). Histopathology was at least as sensitive as PCR (on average 93.6[%] [[]89.9-96.9[%]]) but less specific than the two other tests (on average 83.3[%] [[]78.7-87.6[%]]). These results suggest that PCR has the potential to replace bacteriology to confirm bTB diagnosis on samples collected from suspected cattle.