Haseeb Ahmed, U.S. economist at JPMorgan, said the Department of Labor's weekly report always garners a fair deal of attention and there may even be more eyes watching the numbers this week after the unexpectedly low decline in April's nonfarm payrolls report last Friday.

A low claims number may reinforce that report, but there's too much noise in the weekly numbers to forecast what will happen with any accuracy, he said.

In the previous week, initial jobless claims rose to 380k from 345k, while the volatile four-week moving average moved down for the second consecutive week to 363.8k from 370k.

Of the 41 forecasts, estimates range from a low of 350k jobless claims to a high of 390k.

Continuing claims for the week ending April 19 also bumped up in the previous report, rising to 3.019 million from the prior week's 2.945 million. This marked the first time in four years that continuing claims crossed the 3 million mark.

After the previous week's report, Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at HFE, noted that the less erratic eight-week moving average of initial claims rose 4.5k to a new cycle high of 369.2k, "slightly higher than the level prevailing at the start of the recession in 2001."

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