One of the important components in the high voltage overhead lines placed on the transmission tower is an insulator. Insulators that are installed outdoor will be exposed to the environment directly. Due to environmental conditions and pollutants attached to the surface, leakage currents can flow on the surface of the insulator. Large leakage currents can damage the surface of the insulator and cause losses in the form of heat and even cause flashover. This paper provides an alternative way to prevent early flashover by detecting the severity of the insulator surface based on harmonic measurements of leakage currents. Insulator performance mainly depends on the conductivity of the surface layer being polluted or by generating pollutants via the equivalent salt deposit density (ESDD). The leakage currents were evaluated at different ESDD levels as deposits of very light, light, moderate, and heavy NaCl salt pollution on a 20 kV outdoor polymer insulators. From the experiments, it can be concluded that: i. The leakage current that occurs when the surface of the insulator is very lightly polluted has an unsymmetrical waveform that is distorted and leads to a positive with a large THD; ii. The magnitude of the leakage current with the surface of the insulator is polluted, which leads to greater weight, but the harmonic distortion and THD are getting smaller with the waveform of the leakage current signal leading to a sinusoidal waveform.