LeetCode 185: Department Top Three Salaries

Date: February 05, 2026
Category: SQL
Time Taken: 5 minutes
Difficulty: Hard

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Problem Statement

A company's executives are interested in seeing who earns the most money in each of the company's departments. A high earner in a department is an employee who has a salary in the top three unique salaries for that department.

Write a solution to find the employees who are high earners in each of the departments.

Link: Department Top Three Salaries

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My Approach

• This is a classic problem, and we will solve it using window functions, which are more modern and scalable.

• We will use DENSE_RANK() on each department and order by salary. This will give us the ranks for every department.

• We will store this in a CTE and use it to get only those with a rank of 3 or less.

Solution Code:

WITH ranks AS (
    SELECT 
        d.name AS Department, 
        e.name AS Employee, 
        e.salary AS Salary, 
        DENSE_RANK() OVER(PARTITION BY e.departmentId ORDER BY e.salary DESC) AS rnk
    FROM Employee AS e
    JOIN Department AS d
    ON e.departmentId = d.id)

SELECT Department, Employee, Salary
FROM ranks
WHERE rnk <= 3

Pattern: Window Functions

Mistakes I Made: None, Easy problem.

Series: 90 Days of Data Engineering Progress: 34/90 problems completed

Tags: #DEQuest #LeetCode #SQL #DataEngineering #BuildInPublic