Inf-sup stable FEM applied to time-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes flows are considered. The focus lies on robust estimates for the kinetic and dissipation energies in a twofold sense. Firstly, pressure-robustness ensures the fulfilment of a fundamental invariance principle and velocity error estimates are not corrupted by the pressure approximability. Secondly, Re-semi-robustness means that constants appearing on the right-hand side of kinetic and dissipation energy error estimates (including Gronwall constants) do not explicitly depend on the Reynolds number. Such estimates rely on the essential regularity assumption ∇u ∈ L 1 (0, T ; L ∞ (Ω )) which is discussed in detail. In the sense of best practice, we review and establish pressure-and Re-semi-robust estimates for pointwise divergence-free H 1 -conforming FEM (like Scott-Vogelius pairs or certain isogeometric based FEM) and pointwise divergence-free H(div)-conforming discontinuous Galerkin FEM. For convection-dominated problems, the latter naturally includes an upwind stabilisation for the velocity which is not gradient-based.Keywords time-dependent incompressible flow · Re-semi-robust error estimates · pressure-robustness · inf-sup stable methods · exactly divergence-free FEMA relatively new aspect in the FE analysis applied to incompressible flows is 'pressurerobustness' [41]. In its most general form, pressure-robustness of a numerical method is defined by its ability to fulfil the following requirement: if the exact solution u u u of (1) belongs to the approximation space V V V h , i.e. if u u u ∈ V V V h , then the discrete solution u u u h coincides with the exact one, that is, u u u h = u u u. In certain physical regimes of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations -i.e., in certain benchmarks -pressure-robustness allows to use less expensive discretisation schemes without losing accuracy [49,1]. As a consequence, the following fundamental invariance principle transfers from the continuous level to the discretised case: Replacing the source term f f f by f f f + ∇ψ changes the solution (u u u, p) to (u u u, p + ψ). For example, in a potential flow, (u u u · · · ∇)u u u can be very large but it is a gradient and therefore balanced by the pressure gradient and thus does not have any impact on the velocity field. Only recently it has been shown that high Reynolds number potential flows are really challenging for the numerical solution with standard low-order Galerkin-FEM [50,41].A well-known important consequence for methods which are not pressure-robust is that already for the steady incompressible Stokes problem the velocity error estimates for kinetic and dissipation energies are corrupted by the pressure approximability multiplied by ν −1/2 [41,49]. Note that the mechanism responsible for the excitation of this kind of numerical error is a completely linear phenomenon. Exactly divergence-free FEM are naturally pressure-robust, but classical inf-sup stable velocity-pressure pairs like Taylor-Hood FEM are usually not pressure-robust. In fact, ...