The water bill went up and nothing looks wet
You noticed it on the bill, not on the floor. Thirty, fifty dollars more than last month, and nobody in the house has done anything different. No puddle by the water heater, no stain on the ceiling, no soft spot in the carpet. That is usually the first and only sign people get before a leak has been running for weeks.
Nixa sits on a lot of clay and rock, and a lot of the housing stock here was built from the 1990s through the mid 2000s during the town's big growth years. Slab foundations are common in the newer subdivisions off Tracker Road and out toward Christian County, and a slab leak does not announce itself. Water finds the path of least resistance under concrete and often travels sideways before it ever reaches a crack where you'd see it.
What the Ozarks seasons do to pipe
Southwest Missouri does not get the deep freezes of the upper Midwest, but it gets just enough hard cold snaps, usually a handful of nights each January, to stress pipe that already moved during the summer. Clay soil here expands when it is wet and shrinks hard when it dries out in August. That cycle, swell and shrink, year after year, works on copper joints and on the fittings where a pipe passes through a slab or a foundation wall.
Older homes around downtown Nixa, some going back to before the town's growth boom, still have original galvanized or early copper runs. Those pipes are decades past the point where small pinhole leaks are a surprise. Newer homes aren't immune either. PEX connections and slab penetrations can leak at a fitting even in a house built ten years ago.
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What you can actually check yourself
Start with the water meter. Shut off every faucet and appliance that uses water, then watch the meter's leak indicator, usually a small triangle or dial, for a few minutes. If it moves with everything off, water is going somewhere you can't see.
Walk the house and feel for warm spots on the floor, especially if you have a slab foundation. A warm patch of tile or carpet in an otherwise cool house can mean a hot water line leaking underneath. Check the water heater pan and the area around it, and look at your crawl space if you have one, since those tend to show mildew or a faint mineral smell before anything else does.
Compare your last few water bills month to month rather than just looking at the latest one. A gradual creep over three or four months is a different problem than a sudden spike, and it helps whoever you call narrow down whether you're dealing with a fixture, a supply line, or something under the slab.
Where this stops being a DIY job
If the meter test shows movement and you can't find a wet spot anywhere in the house, that's the line. At that point you're not looking for a leak anymore, you're trying to locate one that's hidden in a slab, a wall cavity, or ground that's already graded and landscaped. That takes acoustic equipment or thermal imaging, not a flashlight and a crawl space visit.
A plumbing inspection at this stage isn't about fixing anything yet. It's about finding the exact point where water is escaping before anyone starts cutting concrete or drywall. Guessing wrong on a slab leak means a hole in the wrong spot and a bill for work that didn't need to happen.
Why this matters more here than it looks like it should
Clay soil holds water close to the foundation instead of letting it drain away, so a slab leak in Nixa can sit and saturate the ground under your house for a long time before it surfaces as a crack or a shift in the slab itself. By the time you see a problem in the structure, the water has usually been working on it for months.
Catching it early, while it's still just an odd bill and a warm patch of floor, is the difference between a contained repair and a foundation issue. If your bill has crept up for two months running and you can't explain it, that's worth a real look before the ground under your house decides to explain it for you.