Wall Street gained as a report suggested the US labour market remains solid ahead of next week's gathering of Federal Reserve policy makers.
A report showed claims for unemployment benefits fell by 6,000 to 275,000 in the week ended September 5, which was in line with expectations.
"The job market is in good shape," Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania, told Bloomberg. "Sub-300,000 initial claims is historically rare but the norm this year."
A separate report showed US import prices dropped 1.8 percent in August from July, the biggest drop since January.
Most economists still expect the Fed to raise rates this year, as suggested repeatedly by Chair Janet Yellen. However, the probability of a rate hike this month is less than 30 percent according to contracts on the overnight lending rate.