diff --git a/src/tools/tidy/src/deps.rs b/src/tools/tidy/src/deps.rs
index 5a843ea61ec6f..b604b39967ec7 100644
--- a/src/tools/tidy/src/deps.rs
+++ b/src/tools/tidy/src/deps.rs
@@ -189,6 +189,8 @@ const PERMITTED_DEPENDENCIES: &[&str] = &[
     "winapi-i686-pc-windows-gnu",
     "winapi-util",
     "winapi-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu",
+    // this is a false-positive: it's only used by rustfmt, but because it's enabled through a feature, tidy thinks it's used by rustc as well.
+    "yansi-term",
 ];
 
 /// Dependency checks.