The focus of this article is on conditional stability estimates for ill-posed inverse problems in partial differential equations. Conditional stability estimates have been obtained in related literature by a couple different methods. In this article, we propose a method called interpolation method, which is based on interpolation in variable Hilbert scales. We provide the theoretical background of this method and show that optimal conditional stability estimates are obtained. The capabilities of our method are illustrated by a comprehensive collection of different inverse and ill-posed PDE problems containing elliptic and parabolic problems, one source problem and the problem of analytic continuation.