[en] We construct a Lifshitz-like version of five-dimensional (5D) QED which is UV completed and reduces at low energies to ordinary 5D QED. The UV quantum behavior of this theory is very smooth. In particular, the gauge coupling constant is finite at all energy scales and at all orders in perturbation theory. We study the IR properties of this theory, when compactified on a circle, and compare the one-loop energy dependence of the coupling in the Lifshitz theory with that coming from the standard 5D QED effective field theory. The range of validity of the 5D effective field theory is found to agree with the more conservative version of naive dimensional analysis.