Exact figures are very hard to pin down; The Battle of France: Then and Now attempts to fully catalogue air claims and losses, but acknowledges that "... official records of the period are often fragmentary, unreliable and contradictory". Williamson Murray's Strategy for Defeat gives figures of 240 German losses (destroyed and damaged) and 177 British between May 26th and June 3rd, citing Ellis, The War in France and Flanders, and noting that though German losses were for the entire western theatre the main effort at the time was over Dunkirk. Norman Franks in Air Battle for Dunkirk puts German losses as 156 'on all parts of the front', with 19 of those away from Dunkirk, leaving 132 losses from all causes (including anti-aircraft fire; the Royal Navy claimed 35 shot down); from Fighter Command he notes 55 pilots and 6 air-gunners killed, 8 taken prisoner and 12 wounded, with another 39 pilots forced to bale out but recovered. Douglas C. Dildy in Dunkirk 1940: Operation Dynamo gives a total of 42 German bombers and 36 fighters shot down by fighters over Dunkirk (with another 6 lost to AA fire) and the RAF's 11 Group losing 84 fighters.

Though fighting over Dunkirk was fierce, and the first time the RAF had committed Spitfires to the battle, German losses were heavier during earlier phases of the Battle of France - around 1,500 aircraft in total over the whole of May 1940 (heaviest on the opening day of May 10th, over 200 Junkers 52 transports lost on that day alone). Despite those losses, it did what it needed to do: destroyed enemy air forces on the ground as well as in the air and, in conjunction with ground forces, dislocated Allied command and control systems to keep them off balance. As Stephen Bungay puts it in Most Dangerous Enemy, "Such blows are designed to create air superiority for a limited but crucial period of time. The ultimate expression of it is a tank on the runway."

Dunkirk, as Adolf Galland wrote in The First and the Last, "should have been an emphatic warning for the leaders of the German Luftwaffe". With German ground forces halted the air force alone could not prevent the Allied evacuation, despite Goering's boasts. At the time, though, it didn't seem to be of great consequence; the Battle of France continued for another three weeks, there was an assumption that Britain would sue for peace afterwards. When that didn't happen the Luftwaffe was unprepared for a protracted battle of attrition that didn't end up with tanks on British runways whereas the RAF had been preparing for just such an eventuality, Hugh Dowding of Fighter Command vociferously (and successfully) insisting that fighters, especially Spitfires, were retained in Britain rather than being sent to France. The result was the British victory in the Battle of Britain, the end of plans for a German invasion of the UK (if they were ever serious) in favour of attacking the Soviet Union, and everything that followed.