It is widely accepted that confidence interval construction has important advantages over significance testing for the presentation of research results, as now facilitated by readily available software. However, for a number of effect measures, procedures are either not available or not satisfactory in samples of small to moderate size. In this paper, we describe a general approach for estimating a difference between effect measures, which can also be used to obtain confidence limits for a risk ratio and a lognormal mean. Numerical evaluation shows that this closed-form procedure outperforms existing methods, including the bootstrap.