Recent progress in the study of the contact process (see Shankar Bhamidi, Danny Nam, Oanh Nguyen, and Allan Sly [Ann. Probab. 49 (2021), pp. 244–286]) has verified that the extinction-survival threshold
λ
1
\lambda _1
on a Galton-Watson tree is strictly positive if and only if the offspring distribution
ξ
\xi
has an exponential tail. In this paper, we derive the first-order asymptotics of
λ
1
\lambda _1
for the contact process on Galton-Watson trees and its corresponding analog for random graphs. In particular, if
ξ
\xi
is appropriately concentrated around its mean, we demonstrate that
λ
1
(
ξ
)
∼
1
/
E
ξ
\lambda _1(\xi ) \sim 1/\mathbb {E} \xi
as
E
ξ
→
∞
\mathbb {E}\xi \rightarrow \infty
, which matches with the known asymptotics on
d
d
-regular trees. The same results for the short-long survival threshold on the Erdős-Rényi and other random graphs are shown as well.