The 3XMM-DR5 catalogue contains 565962 detections which relate to 396910 unique sources from 7781 observations that were public by the 31st December 2013. 3XMM-DR5 covers a total sky area, with at least 1 ks exposure, of ~1144 square degrees if overlaps are taken into account, where some regions of the sky have been pointed as many as 48 times. This represents an increase of approximately 7% in terms of unique sources compared with 3XMM-DR4 that was released in July 2013. Around 10% of the detections are classified as extended, and spectra and time series have been extracted for around 25% of the sources. The positional uncertainty of the catalogue detections is generally less than 3 arcseconds (90% confidence) and the astrometric quality of 3XMM is improved with respect to previous releases. Typical sensitivities in the catalogue are ~6x10E-15 and ~1.5x10E-14 erg/cm2/s in the soft (0.2-2 keV) and hard (2-12 keV) X-ray band, respectively.