We determine a next-to-leading order result for the correlator of the shear stress operator in high-temperature Yang-Mills theory. The computation is performed via an ultraviolet expansion, valid in the limit of small distances or large momenta, and the result is used for writing operator product expansions for the Euclidean momentum and coordinate space correlators as well as for the Minkowskian spectral density. In addition, our results enable us to confirm and refine a shear sum rule originally derived by Romatschke, Son and Meyer.