An interior design quotation is a fixed price for a defined scope of design work, given before the work begins. A proposal is a quotation wrapped in a plan: the brief, the scope, the phases and the fee together. An estimate is a non-binding guess at the same number. Clients ask for all three and usually mean the second.
The hard part of a quotation isn't the document. It's the moment you type the number and feel it. Too high and you've talked yourself into a story about a client who walks. Too low and you've already decided they'll say yes and you'll regret it. Designers call this the money story, and it shows up in every quote you've ever rounded down.
This guide is the structural half of the answer. It won't fix how you feel about the number, but it will give the number somewhere solid to sit.
Quotation, proposal, contract: which one are you writing?
In the US, "proposal" is the usual word and "quote" is what you give for a single line of work. In the UK and Australia, "quotation" often covers the whole document, plan and all. Whatever you call it, there are three documents and they do three jobs.
Document | What it is | What it answers | Signed? |
|---|---|---|---|
Quotation (quote) | A fixed price for a defined scope | "What does it cost?" | No |
Proposal | Brief + scope + phases + fee + furnishing range | "What are we buying, and from whom?" | Accepted, not signed |
Contract / letter of agreement | The legal terms you both agree to | "What happens if…?" | Yes |
The proposal is where the quotation lives for most residential work. The contract follows acceptance; it should never be the first document a client sees with a number on it.
What an interior design quotation must include
If one of these is missing, the client fills the gap with an assumption, and their assumption is rarely in your favour.
- The scope, by room. Which rooms, and what you're doing in each. One table.
- What's not included. Written down, next to what is. This line does more work than any other on the page.
- The design fee, and how it's billed. The figure, the structure (flat, hourly, percentage) and the payment schedule.
- What the fee covers. Phases, site visits, revision rounds. Say how many.
- How purchasing works and how pricing is shown. One sentence. Do you buy on their behalf? Is the price they see the price they pay?
- An estimated furnishing budget. As a range, by room. Covered properly below.
- What moves the number. Lead times, decision speed, scope changes. Name the variables so they aren't surprises.
- A validity date. Thirty days is common. After that, fees and timeline can be revisited.
- The next step. What accepting looks like, and what happens the day after.
What to leave off
A quotation is a client document. These four things don't belong on it.
- Your trade cost. The client sees their price. What you paid is your business, and most client-facing documents that show both get argued about line by line.
- Your margin. Same reason. A "markup" column invites a "can you reduce the markup?" conversation that no designer has ever enjoyed.
- Supplier names. Especially at quotation stage. A client with a supplier name and a browser will find the retail price within an hour, and your pricing policy is now a negotiation.
- An hourly breakdown, if you're quoting a flat fee. Showing "110 hours at $165" under a flat fee of $18,500 invites the client to argue the hours. A flat fee is a price for an outcome; leave it as one.
The client sees their price. What you paid is your business.
The three fee structures, compared
Pricing in this industry is unstandardised; coaches describe it as "the Wild West", and the client across the table has probably been quoted three different ways by three different designers. Pick one, explain it in a sentence, and you're already ahead.
Structure | How it works | Pros | Cons | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Hourly | Rate × time logged, billed monthly | Fair when scope is uncertain; nothing unpaid | Clients fear the open meter; you're paid for time, not value | Consultations, small jobs, scope that's still moving |
Flat fee | One price per project or room, billed on milestones | Known on day one; rewards your efficiency | Scope creep eats it unless "not included" is clear | Defined residential projects, full-service rooms |
Percentage of budget | Fee = X% of the furnishing or construction total | Scales with project size; easy to explain | Looks like an incentive to spend more; awkward when budgets fall | Large furnishing projects, design-build |
Many studios blend them: a flat design fee plus purchasing at a stated policy, or hourly for discovery and flat from concept onward. The fee calculator will turn a scope and a rate into a flat figure if you want a starting point.
A worked example
Here's the Investment page from a six-room residential proposal, the same one that ships as the filled example in our proposal template. Studio: Harbor & Pine Interiors. Client: the Nguyen family. Project: Harborview Residence.
Design fee options
Option A: flat fee | Option B: hourly | |
|---|---|---|
Fee | $18,500 | $165/hr, estimated 110 hours (approx. $18,150) |
Billed | 25% on signing, 25% at concept, 25% at end of design development, 25% at installation | Monthly against time logged |
Includes | Five phases, six rooms, two site visits per phase, one concept revision round, procurement management, install day | Same scope; notice before hours pass 100 |
Excludes | Extra revision rounds ($165/hr), rooms added later | Rooms added later |
Estimated furnishing budget by room
Room | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
Living Room | $38,000 | $52,000 |
Dining Room | $30,000 | $40,000 |
Primary Bedroom | $26,000 | $36,000 |
Home Office | $16,000 | $22,000 |
Entry & Hallway | $10,000 | $14,000 |
Powder Room | $20,000 | $26,000 |
Total | $140,000 | $190,000 |
Under the tables, one sentence on purchasing: "We purchase on your behalf through our trade accounts. The price you see on every item is the price you pay." And one on what's excluded: construction, trades, freight and installation, permits, tax.
Notice what isn't there. No cost column, no margin, no supplier names, no hours under the flat fee. The two options sit side by side so the client is choosing between ways to pay you, not whether to.
How to present the furnishing budget as a range by room
Most quotations either skip the furniture number (and the client learns in design development that the sofa is $9,000) or paste in a spreadsheet (and the client learns what you paid for it). A range by room is the middle path.
Give each room a low and a high. Put a short note beside the ones with a wide spread, naming what drives it: "sofa, pair of lounge chairs and drapery drive the range." Total the columns. Then say when it firms up: narrowed at concept approval, itemised in design development, nothing ordered without a per-item approval.
Done this way, the range does three things at once. It tells the client the real size of the project before they commit. It gives you room to design without re-quoting every time a selection changes. And it makes the pricing policy sentence believable, because the client can see the numbers you're applying it to.
Do I charge for a consultation or a quote?
Honestly: many designers do, and some don't, and both are defensible.
Charging for the initial consultation is common, because it's two to three hours of your expertise in their home and it filters out the people collecting free ideas. A good number of designers credit that fee against the design fee if the client proceeds, which makes it feel like a deposit rather than a toll.
Charging for the quotation itself is rarer. The proposal is a sales document; most studios absorb it. What you shouldn't absorb is concept work inside the proposal. Describe the approach. Don't design the room until they've said yes.
And for new designers wondering what to charge: the same structures apply at a lower rate. Price the scope honestly rather than discounting the rate, because a low rate is far harder to raise later than a small scope is to grow.
What to say when they ask for a discount
They will. Here are three replies that keep the fee intact and the relationship warm. (More of these, for approvals and sign-off, are in the client approval scripts.)
When they ask you to lower the fee "I'd rather adjust the scope than the fee. If we take the home office out of this phase, the fee comes down to [X] and we can add it back when you're ready. Would that help?"
When they ask for the hours or the markup "The flat fee is a price for the finished rooms, not for my hours, so I don't break it down that way. On furnishings, the price you see is the price you pay. That's the policy, and it's the same for every client."
When they've had a cheaper quote "That's fair, and some studios price differently. What I can tell you is what's inside this number: five phases, two site visits each, procurement managed, and install day. If the other quote covers the same, choose on who you'd rather work with for seven months."
None of these say no. They move the conversation from the number to the scope, which is where you have room to be generous.
Where this goes in Mortar
Two different "quotes" show up on a design job, and Mortar treats them as different things. Your quotation to the client is what this guide is about. Supplier quotes coming in are what Mortar's Quote Inbox handles: forward the supplier's email to your project's private address, attachments and all, and it lands parsed into lines you can check and accept into real items and costs.
The budget side picks up where the proposal leaves off. Every room in Mortar has its own budget, so the room figures from your proposal become the room budgets on day one, and adding, swapping or approving an item updates the room total straight away. In the client portal you choose what each client sees: full item pricing, totals only, or none. Trade costs and margins never appear there. The discipline on this page, in software.
Start with the template. The free proposal template has every section above, plus the full Harborview Residence example filled in. Word, Google Docs or Pages.
FAQ
How long should an interior design quotation be? A quotation on its own can be one page: scope, fee, what's included, what's excluded, validity. A full proposal runs four to six pages plus a cover. If it's going past eight, you're writing the design concept into it, and that's work they haven't paid for yet.
Should the quotation show the furniture budget as a single number or a range? A range, by room, with a note on what drives the spread. A single number at quotation stage is either a guess presented as a fact or a figure you'll have to re-quote the first time a selection changes.
What's the difference between a quotation and a proposal? The quotation is the price. The proposal is the price plus the brief, the scope, the phases and the next steps. In the UK and Australia "quotation" is often used for both; in the US it's usually "proposal" for the document and "quote" for a single price.
Can I change the fee after the client accepts? Only for changes to scope, agreed in writing before the extra work starts, and that rule should be in the quotation itself. The validity date protects you the other way: a client who comes back after it has lapsed gets a revised fee and timeline, not the old one.
