Experts say 'affordable' rent costs 30% of your monthly income. Here are the US cities where people can actually pay that.

• For your housing to generally be considered affordable, you shouldn't pay more than 30% of your income on rent.
• There are more than 60 US cities where at least half the population is following that rule.
• You won't find notoriously expensive cities like New York or San Francisco on the list - many of the entries are cities in the South and Midwest.

A standard measure of housing affordability says you shouldn't pay more than 30% of your salary on rent.

Of course, that's near impossible for millions of hardworking Americans, in part because of the soaring cost of housing and stagnating wages in the US.

But there are still some places in America where it's possible to earn a decent salary while saving money on rent. In fact, there are more than 60 major cities and urban areas where more than half the population spends less than 30% of their income on rent.

Using data from the US Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey, we compiled the 20 large US metro areas with the highest share of residents paying less than 30% of their income on rent. In the No. 1 metro on the list, a whopping 64.4% of the population manages to meet that benchmark each month. As a cutoff, we went with metro areas with at least 500,000 residents.

You won't find notoriously pricey cities like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, on this list. Instead, the cities where people manage to both earn and save are mostly concentrated in the South and Midwest.

Read on the see the top 20 US cities where you can earn a decent salary and keep most of it, too.