Abstract We show that a well-known linearization technique initially proposed for quadratic assignment problems can be generalized to a broader class of quadratic 0-1 mixed-integer problems subject to assignment constraints. The resulting linearized formulation is more compact and tighter than that obtained with a more usual linearization technique. We discuss the application of the compact linearization to three classes of problems in the literature, among which the graph partitioning problem, where we provide a computational study.