diff --git a/pkgs/tools/nix/nixos-render-docs/src/nixos_render_docs/manual.py b/pkgs/tools/nix/nixos-render-docs/src/nixos_render_docs/manual.py
index 2c80d1eaab86..d14b4f5d29bf 100644
--- a/pkgs/tools/nix/nixos-render-docs/src/nixos_render_docs/manual.py
+++ b/pkgs/tools/nix/nixos-render-docs/src/nixos_render_docs/manual.py
@@ -304,7 +304,8 @@ class ManualHTMLRenderer(RendererMixin, HTMLRenderer):
             '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"',
             '  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">',
             '<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">',
-            ' <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />',
+            ' <head>',
+            '  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />',
             f' <title>{toc.target.title}</title>',
             "".join((f'<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{html.escape(style, True)}" />'
                      for style in self._html_params.stylesheets)),
