The second highest salary
Hard · Company database · Subqueries, COUNT, SUM, AVG
Find the employees who earn the second highest salary in the company. Several people can share a salary, so the second highest salary is the largest amount below the top salary, however many people earn the top one.
Return name and salary of everyone paid that amount, in that order, sorted by name A to Z.
Expected result
| name | salary |
|---|---|
| Fatima Rahman | 180000 |
| Kenji Watanabe | 180000 |
The company tables
assignments: 30 rows, first 5 shown
| id | employee_id | project_id | hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8 | 1 | 320 |
| 2 | 9 | 1 | 410 |
| 3 | 11 | 1 | 380 |
| 4 | 12 | 2 | 290 |
| 5 | 10 | 2 | 150 |
departments: 8 rows, first 5 shown
| id | name | location |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Engineering | Bengaluru |
| 2 | Sales | London |
| 3 | Marketing | London |
| 4 | Finance | Singapore |
| 5 | Human Resources | Bengaluru |
employees: 27 rows, first 5 shown
| id | name | department_id | manager_id | job_title | salary | hire_date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Meera Krishnan | NULL | NULL | Chief Executive Officer | 250000 | 2015-03-01 |
| 2 | Daniel Okoye | 1 | 1 | Chief Technology Officer | 250000 | 2015-03-01 |
| 3 | Sophie Laurent | 2 | 1 | Head of Sales | 150000 | 2017-01-09 |
| 4 | Rahul Bansal | 4 | 1 | Finance Director | 166000 | 2016-11-21 |
| 5 | Hannah Schmidt | 5 | 1 | Human Resources Manager | 110000 | 2018-04-02 |
projects: 10 rows, first 5 shown
| id | name | department_id | budget | start_date | end_date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Payments Platform | 1 | 450000 | 2025-01-06 | 2025-09-30 |
| 2 | Mobile App Redesign | 1 | 300000 | 2025-03-03 | NULL |
| 3 | Data Warehouse | 1 | 380000 | 2025-06-02 | 2026-03-31 |
| 4 | Spring Campaign | 3 | 90000 | 2025-02-10 | 2025-05-30 |
| 5 | Partner Portal | 2 | 150000 | 2025-04-14 | 2025-12-19 |
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