In the first week of July, initial claims for unemployment benefits in the U.S. fell to the third-lowest level this year, and could signal an improving labor market, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

New applications for those benefits last week dropped by 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 304,000 claims. Before the report was released, economists had predicted that there would be 319,000 new claims.

The previous week had 315,000 new claims for unemployment benefits and the rolling average of the last four weeks was 311,500 claims, the Journal reported.

"The claims data remain extremely encouraging," Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, told the Journal.

Despite the encouragement of the low claims last week, economists are expecting an uptick over the next couple of weeks, as the summer season is tough on jobs due to summer vacation and the auto-industry shutdown.

Chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Ian Sheperdson told the Journal that he does expect those factory shutdowns to impact the jobless claims, but said he is seeing a "favorable underlying trend" in the data.

The number of U.S. workers who are repeatedly drawing unemployment benefits rose by 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted level of 2.58 million, Thursday's report said, according to Fox Business.

Economists are hopeful the jobs market will continue to improve because employers have added more than 200,000 jobs per month over the past five months, the U.S. Department of Labor reported.

The U.S. unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, down from a high of 10 percent in October 2009, but not yet close to the low of 4.4 percent unemployment back in May 2007, according to U.S. labor stats.

Fox reported that even with the lower-than-expected jobless claims, the U.S. markets didn't react positively to the news. Stock futures were down on Thursday morning with concerns over Italy's economy and questions about Portugal's top bank.