Large leak location errors under the low signaltonoise ratio (SNR) of leakage vibration signal in watersupply pipeline (WSP) are considered in this study. Leak location based on the combination of variational mode decomposition (VMD) and crossspectral analysis is proposed. First, the leak signal is decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using VMD. The characteristic frequency band can be determined using crossspectral analysis of the water supply pipeline leakage signal. Then, the effective IMF components are determined by using the energy ratio of the IMF component in the characteristic frequency band as a selection criterion. The selected effective IMF components are reconstructed to improve SNR. Finally, the reconstructed signals are used to estimate time delay to find a leakage position. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the leak location based on combination of VMD and crossspectral, crosscorrelation, and combination of VMD and correlation coefficient are compared in simulation and experiment respectively. Results show that the average relative location errors of the above three kinds of leak location algorithms are 253%, 862%, and 1686% respectively.