SQL Query To Find the Second Highest Salary

Finding the maximum salary is very easy, you just need to select the field with max function:

SELECT max(salary) FROM employees;

Sometime you need to find the 2nd highest salary or 2nd highest number from a column. Assume following data exist in employees table:

mysql> select * from employees;
+----+--------+-------------------+--------+
| id | name   | email             | salary |
+----+--------+-------------------+--------+
|  1 | Alice  | alice@gmail.com   |  10000 |
|  2 | Bob    | bob@gmail         |  20000 |
|  3 | Oracle | oracle@gmail.com  |  30000 |
|  4 | John   | john@example.com  |  15000 |
|  5 | Chris  | chris@example.com |  25000 |
|  6 | Moris  | moris@example.com |  35000 |
+----+--------+-------------------+--------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)

If you need to select the 2nd highest salary, you can use the following query:

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

Lets see the output, when query is executed against above table:

mysql>SELECT max(salary) FROM employees WHERE salary < (SELECT max(salary) FROM employees);

+-------------+
| max(salary) |
+-------------+
|       30000 |
+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

You see from above data, the highest salary was 3500, so 30000 is the 2nd highest value.