The article is devoted to the optimization of the negative pressure wave method, designed to determine the location of leaks from a gas pipeline.The proposed negative pressure wave method provides a more accurate determination of the leak location, because a group of readable equally spaced sensors is used. To determine the location of a leak, the sign of the appearance of a minimum of a certain functional is used, which contains, as an integrand, the product of two exponential functions that cha racterize the weakening of a negative pressure wave propagating from the location of the leak to the position of the selected left and right sensors.Calculation formulas are given for calculating the optimal distance between a displaced pair of readable sensors, and the form of the optimal functional relationship between the distances from the place of leakage to the position of the sensors is established.