This volume contains the formal proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Rewriting Techniques for Program Transformations and Evaluation (WPTE 2018), held on 8th of Juli 2018 in Oxford, United Kingdom, and affiliated with FLoC 2018 and FSCD 2018. Scope of WPTE: Rewriting techniques are of great help for studying correctness of program transformations, translations and evaluation, and the aim of WPTE is to bring together the researchers working on program transformations, evaluation, and operationally-based programming language semantics, using rewriting methods, in order to share the techniques and recent developments and to exchange ideas to encourage further activation of research in this area. Topics in the scope of WPTE include the correctness of program transformations, optimisations and translations; program transformations for proving termination, confluence and other properties; correctness of evaluation strategies; operational semantics of programs, operationally-based program equivalences such as contextual equivalences and bisimulations; cost-models for reasoning about the optimizing power of transformations and the costs of evaluation; program transformations for verification and theorem proving purposes; translation, simulation, equivalence of programs with different formalisms, and evaluation strategies; program transformations for applying rewriting techniques to programs in specific programming languages; program transformations for program