 Exponential total progeny tail for bounded subcritical offspring

If a Galton-Watson process starts from one ancestor and has bounded nonnegative integer offspring $Z$ with $\mathbb{E}Z<1$, its total progeny $T$ obeys $\mathbb{P}(T>n)\le e^{-cn}$ for some $c>0$ and all integers $n\ge 1$. Explore one individual at a time. The unexplored queue has size $1+{\sum }_{j=1}^t(Z_j-1)$ until its first hit of zero, whose hitting time is $T$. Hence $T>n$ implies ${\sum }_{j=1}^n(Z_j-1)\ge 0$. Boundedness makes $M(\theta )=\mathbb{E}{e}^{\theta (Z-1)}$ finite near zero, with $M(0)=1$ and $M^{\prime }(0)=\mathbb{E}Z-1<0$. Choose $\theta >0$ with $M(\theta )<1$. The exponential Markov inequality gives the desired bound with $c=-\log M(\theta )$. The same proof works whenever the offspring law has an exponential moment near zero, even without boundedness.