SQL query to find Nth highest salary from a salary table

Question

How can I find the Nth highest salary in a table containing salaries in SQL Server?

Answer 1

Solution 1: This SQL to find the Nth highest salary should work in SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Oracle, Teradata, and almost any other RDBMS: (note: low performance because of subquery)

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)

The most important thing to understand in the query above is that the subquery is evaluated each and every time a row is processed by the outer query. In other words, the inner query can not be processed independently of the outer query since the inner query uses the Emp1 value as well.

In order to find the Nth highest salary, we just find the salary that has exactly N-1 salaries greater than itself.

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Solution 2: Find the nth highest salary using the TOP keyword in SQL Server

SELECT TOP 1 Salary
FROM (
      SELECT DISTINCT TOP N Salary
      FROM Employee
      ORDER BY Salary DESC
      ) AS Emp
ORDER BY Salary

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Solution 3: Find the nth highest salary in SQL Server without using TOP

SELECT Salary FROM Employee 
ORDER BY Salary DESC OFFSET N-1 ROW(S) 
FETCH FIRST ROW ONLY

Note that I haven’t personally tested the SQL above, and I believe that it will only work in SQL Server 2012 and up.