diff --git a/rest_framework/renderers.py b/rest_framework/renderers.py
index 3298294ce2..baf861a7ed 100644
--- a/rest_framework/renderers.py
+++ b/rest_framework/renderers.py
@@ -852,7 +852,7 @@ class SchemaJSRenderer(BaseRenderer):
 
     def render(self, data, accepted_media_type=None, renderer_context=None):
         codec = coreapi.codecs.CoreJSONCodec()
-        schema = base64.b64encode(codec.encode(data))
+        schema = base64.b64encode(codec.encode(data)).decode('ascii')
 
         template = loader.get_template(self.template)
         context = {'schema': mark_safe(schema)}
diff --git a/tests/test_renderers.py b/tests/test_renderers.py
index 54b3ce9645..ba8400c065 100644
--- a/tests/test_renderers.py
+++ b/tests/test_renderers.py
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 from rest_framework import permissions, serializers, status
 from rest_framework.renderers import (
     AdminRenderer, BaseRenderer, BrowsableAPIRenderer, DocumentationRenderer,
-    HTMLFormRenderer, JSONRenderer, StaticHTMLRenderer
+    HTMLFormRenderer, JSONRenderer, SchemaJSRenderer, StaticHTMLRenderer
 )
 from rest_framework.request import Request
 from rest_framework.response import Response
@@ -736,3 +736,20 @@ def test_document_with_link_named_data(self):
 
         html = renderer.render(document, accepted_media_type="text/html", renderer_context={"request": request})
         assert '<h1>Data Endpoint API</h1>' in html
+
+
+class TestSchemaJSRenderer(TestCase):
+
+    def test_schemajs_output(self):
+        """
+        Test output of the SchemaJS renderer as per #5608. Django 2.0 on Py3 prints binary data as b'xyz' in templates,
+        and the base64 encoding used by SchemaJSRenderer outputs base64 as binary. Test fix.
+        """
+        factory = APIRequestFactory()
+        request = factory.get('/')
+
+        renderer = SchemaJSRenderer()
+
+        output = renderer.render('data', renderer_context={"request": request})
+        assert "'ImRhdGEi'" in output
+        assert "'b'ImRhdGEi''" not in output