We provide an explicit thick and thin decomposition for oriented hyperbolic manifolds $M$ of dimension $5$. The result implies improved universal lower bounds for the volume $\rmvol_5(M)$ and, for $M$ compact, new estimates relating the injectivity radius and the diameter of $M$ with $\rmvol_5(M)$. The quantification of the thin part is based upon the identification of the isometry group of the universal space by the matrix group $\PS_\Delta {\rm L} (2,\mathbb{H})$ of quaternionic $2\times 2$-matrices with Dieudonn\'e determinant $\Delta$ equal to $1$ and isolation properties of $\PS_\Delta {\rm L} (2,\mathbb{H})$.