How to find 2nd and nth highest salary in sql

To Find Max salary

select MAX(Salary) from Employee;

finding the 2nd highest salary in SQL

SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee
WHERE Salary NOT IN (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee )

An alternative solution using the not equals SQL operator

select MAX(Salary) from Employee
WHERE Salary <> (select MAX(Salary) from Employee )

How would you write a SQL query to find the Nth highest salary?

Here we will present one possible answer to finding the nth highest salary first, and the explanation of that answer after since it’s actually easier to understand that way. Note that the first answer we present is actually not optimal from a performance standpoint since it uses a subquery, but we think that it will be interesting for you to learn about because you might just learn something new about SQL. If you want to see the more optimal solutions first, you can skip down to the sections that says “Find the nth highest salary without a subquery” instead.

The SQL below will give you the correct answer – but you will have to plug in an actual value for N of course. This SQL to find the Nth highest salary should work in SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Oracle, Teradata, and almost any other RDBMS:

SELECT * /*This is the outer query part */
FROM Employee Emp1
WHERE (N-1) = ( /* Subquery starts here */
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(Emp2.Salary))
FROM Employee Emp2
WHERE Emp2.Salary > Emp1.Salary)

Finding nth highest salary example and explanation

Let’s step through an actual example to see how the query above will actually execute step by step. Suppose we are looking for the 2nd highest Salary value in our table above, so our N is 2. This means that the query will look like this:

SELECT *
FROM Employee Emp1
WHERE (1) = (
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(Emp2.Salary))
FROM Employee Emp2
WHERE Emp2.Salary > Emp1.Salary)

You can probably see that Emp1 and Emp2 are just aliases for the same Employee table – it’s like we just created 2 separate clones of the Employee table and gave them different names.