Nth Highest Salary in SQL – Explained with Examples

 SQL is one of the most powerful tools for managing and analyzing data. Whether you're preparing for a job interview or building real-world applications, understanding how to find the Nth highest salary from a table is a must-have skill.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the concept of the Nth highest salary, different methods to find it, and which technique is best depending on your SQL environment.

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Understanding the Problem

Imagine you have an employees table with various salaries. You need to write a query to find:

• The 1st highest salary

• The 2nd highest salary

• The 3rd highest salary

• And so on...

This is what’s known as finding the “Nth” highest salary.

Here’s an example table:

+----+--------+--------+
| id | name   | salary |
+----+--------+--------+
| 1  | Rahul  | 75000  |
| 2  | Anita  | 68000  |
| 3  | Mohan  | 75000  |
| 4  | Seema  | 85000  |
| 5  | Deepak | 60000  |
+----+--------+--------+

We’ll now explore three commonly used solutions.

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Solution 1: Using ORDER BY with LIMIT and OFFSET (MySQL)

This is one of the easiest ways to get the Nth highest salary in MySQL:

SELECT DISTINCT salary
FROM employees
ORDER BY salary DESC
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2;

Explanation:

• ORDER BY salary DESC: sorts salaries from high to low.

• OFFSET 2: skips the first two rows.

• LIMIT 1: returns the next one — i.e., the 3rd highest salary.

Change the OFFSET value to get a different N.

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Solution 2: Using Subqueries

If your SQL version doesn’t support advanced functions, you can still get the result using nested subqueries.

Here’s how to find the 3rd highest salary

SELECT MAX(salary)
FROM employees
WHERE salary < (
  SELECT MAX(salary)
  FROM employees
  WHERE salary < (
    SELECT MAX(salary)
    FROM employees
  )
);

For the 4th highest, just nest one more level. Although this works well, it can become difficult to maintain for larger N values.

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Solution 3: Using DENSE_RANK() for Accuracy and Simplicity

If your database supports window functions, this is the best method:

SELECT salary
FROM (
  SELECT salary, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY salary DESC) AS rnk
  FROM employees
) AS ranked
WHERE rnk = 3;

Why use DENSE_RANK?

Because it handles duplicate salary values correctly. If two employees share the same salary, they’ll be ranked the same, which is usually what you want when calculating the Nth highest.

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When to Use Which Meth

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Final Words

The Nth highest salary question might seem tricky, but with the right learning approach, it becomes second nature. SQL isn’t just about writing queries — it's about solving problems with data. And that's what you’ll learn at Technogeeks.