Leakage is an important factor to be considered for the management of underground water supply pipelines in a smart water grid system, especially if the pipelines are aged and buried under the pavement or various structures of a highly populated city. Because the exact detection of the location of such leaks in pipelines is essential for their efficient operation, a new methodology for leak location detection based on frequency band variation, windowing filters, and probability is proposed in this paper. Because the exact detection of the leak location depends on the precision of estimation of time delay between sensor signals due to leak noise, some window functions that offer weightings at significant frequencies are applied for calculating the improved cross-correlation function. Experimental results obtained by applying this methodology to an actual buried water supply pipeline, ~ 253.9 m long and made of cast iron, revealed that the approach of frequency band variation with those windows and probability offers better performance for leak location detection.