There were 3 million job openings in the United States on the last day of February 2009, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. That’s a 35 percent decline since its high in 2007. The job openings rate and hires rate remained low, at 2.2 percent and 3.3 percent respectively.

The BLS reports that manufacturing job openings ticked up slightly month-over-month, and job openings with the federal government rose a bit year-over-year. All other sectors stayed the same or decresed.

As far as geographic distribution goes, according to this information from Indeed.com, the mid-Atlantic region and the Bay Area are still doing fairly well. We speculate these job openings are in government (in the DC/Baltimore region, which collectively have more than 200 openings per 1000 people) and in tech (San Jose comes in third with 76 openings per 1000 people).