Comparison between SFRs computed with our new empirical calibration for Lyα as an SFR indicator (Eq. (8)) and those computed based on dust corrected UV luminosity (see Sect. 3.8) for a compilation of z ∼ 5−8 sources (see Matthee et al. 2017b, and references therein). Our simple empirical calibration of Lyα as a SFR is able to recover dust corrected UV SFRs for the most star-forming sources, with a typical scatter of ≈0.2−0.3 dex (the scatter is lower if one assumes a fixed β = −1.6 ± 0.2). For the sources with the lowest UV SFRs we find that Eq. (8) seems to over-predict SFRs, potentially due to IGM effects which can lead to a lower EW₀. We also compute SFRs in the same way with observables from our toy model and show the results of all realisations in grey. We find that the scatter in our toy model is much larger, with this being driven by E(B − V) being able to vary from 0.0 to 0.5.