When a homeowner gets three painting quotes, the spread is often wide enough to be confusing. It's tempting to assume the expensive one is padded. More often the cheap one has simply written a smaller job on the same house.
A quote you can actually compare should name the surfaces. Not 'interior painting' but which rooms, and whether ceilings, trim, doors, baseboards, and closet interiors are in or out. Closets and ceilings are the two most commonly excluded items, and they're the two that make the biggest difference to the day count.
It should say how many coats, and over what. Two coats over a proper primer on a patched wall is a different job from two coats straight onto old paint. If the quote doesn't mention primer at all on a repair-heavy job, that's a real answer, not an oversight.
It should list the prep as work, not as a promise. Patching, sanding, caulking, and priming take hours, and any quote that treats them as an implied courtesy has not budgeted the hours for them. Ask what happens to nail pops and to the cracks in the corners.
It should name the product and sheen. Sheen matters more than most people expect — a flat finish hides an imperfect wall and marks easily, an eggshell cleans well but shows every flaw in the surface underneath. Which one you want depends on the room and on how good the walls actually are.
And it should carry a start date, a realistic duration, and how changes get priced. Any job can turn up something unexpected once the sanding starts; what matters is whether you'll get a number before that extra work happens or an adjusted invoice after it.
Every quote we write lists all of that, and it's free. If you're comparing ours against another, put the two side by side on those points rather than on the total — it usually explains the difference immediately.